B2B Payment Solutions that Help Buyers Pay and AR Teams Save Time

Someone in accounts receivable (AR) picks up the phone. On the other end is a customer who needs help paying an invoice and navigating the decisions that come when faced with five open invoices. They don’t know which is most urgent. They think there might be an early payment discount somewhere but can’t find the details. They’re not sure if paying by card will trigger a surcharge or if there is a window of time when surcharging applies and when that window closes.

This call takes 8 minutes. It gets logged, followed up on, and resolved. And then it happens again tomorrow, with a different buyer, for essentially all the same reasons. The questions are straightforward — there’s just no way to surface the answers proactively. When this happens, the path of least resistance for a busy AP person is to pick up the phone and call the AR person.

This is one of the most common and overlooked inefficiencies in AR. It’s not a process problem. It’s an information problem, and it costs B2B companies a significant amount of time every week.

Customers don’t want to make these calls, and AR teams don’t want to receive them. If you’re exploring B2B payment solutions that solve for this, Billtrust’s Buyer Payment Portal stops the cycle by giving buyers everything they need to make payment decisions on their own.

Here’s how it works.

Automation Actively Guides Payment Decision-Making

As financial pressures intensify and companies explore every option to protect their cash, buyers want the full picture before making any payment decisions. Billtrust’s Buyer Payment Portal is a B2B payment solution. It enables automation to step in with payment guidance that’s in sync with supplier policies.

Billtrust makes it easy for customers to see things like:

• Optimal payment timing: recommendations for when to pay based on due dates, discount opportunities, and payment terms and policies.
• Discount windows: which invoices have early payment discounts available and exactly when those windows close.
• Surcharge avoidance: buyers are guided toward payment methods that avoid surcharge fees, so they can easily see how to pay less.
• Card grace periods: if there is a window during which surcharging fees are not applied, the buyer is encouraged to pay via card during that time.

Putting payment advice at their fingertips is a way to save time, but it also gets you paid faster. When buyers can see exactly what the smartest payment choice looks like (and why), they’re more likely to make a payment. And that means less phone calls and delinquencies for your AR team.

Full Control for AR Managers

When AR managers need to adjust policy settings or make updates inside an AR platform, they often need to open a support ticket or wait on an implementation team. But rigid technologies mean a simple change that should take only minutes can take hours. That’s not the case with Billtrust’s Buyer Payment Portal. It’s a flexible toolset.

AR managers have direct control over the portal and buyer experience, including the ability to make policy changes and respond to new customer agreements and needs. Changes are implemented immediately. This is particularly helpful in these situations:

• If you’ve just negotiated a new early payment discount program with a major buyer segment, you don’t have to wait for support to make updates to the configuration — it’s reflected in the portal as soon as the discounts are available.
• If a buyer is at risk, AR managers can enroll them in autopay and lock that enrollment in place — meaning the client cannot opt out of enrollment without the supplier’s permission. This is a strategic win as it’s a tactic used to protect cash flow and revenue.

Here’s another situation where the flexibility of Billtrust’s solution really comes in handy. Deposits, retainers, project advances, and partial payments on large contracts are common, and they’re usually difficult to handle in AR automation platforms that are built around formal invoice flows.

Billtrust’s Payment Links solve for these moments when B2B payments don’t follow the standard invoice-to-payment cycle. Payment Links are simple, secure links you can send to a buyer so they can pay right away (ACH or card) with no portal login required. Even better, your team can create reusable templates for deposits and prepayments, so they don’t have to create new ones every time.

B2B Payment Solutions: The Effect on AR Team Efficiency

Let’s circle back to the three downstream impacts of a more confident and informed payment experience, as these are the key benefits for AR teams using B2B payment solutions:

1. First, inbound call volume drops. There will always be buyers with legitimate questions or disputes that need human attention, but the routine informational calls — the ones where someone just needed to know about a discount window or a surcharge — get absorbed by the portal. All that time your team spent on those repetitive questions gets redirected to accounts that require it.
2. Second, payment timing improves. When buyers know there’s a discount window closing in two days, they’re more likely to act. When they can see the full cost of paying by card versus ACH, they make more deliberate choices — ones that are usually faster and cheaper for both sides. That’s a direct cash flow win you can count on.
3. Third, exceptions decrease. A lot of payment exceptions in AR happen because B2B buyers make uninformed decisions. They chose a payment method that triggered a surcharge they weren’t expecting. They paid the wrong invoice, or they missed a discount and want to negotiate after the fact. Better upfront guidance makes those situations few and far between.

All of these benefits help contextualize the reasons why AR automation can reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) metrics by up to 41% while increasing AR efficiency gains by up to 95%, according to this research.

Three Things to Remember

• Every call your AR team fields from a buyer who could have paid online is an avoidable operational cost.
• Every discount window that closes before a buyer realizes it is lost revenue.
• Every payment exception that lands in your AR queue because a buyer made an uninformed choice is wasted time.

Our Buyer Payment Portal takes care of all three of those problems. And because it’s connected to the Billtrust AR automation platform, the advantages of faster payments flow right through to cash forecasting, improving visibility for treasury teams too. Learn more about cash flow forecasting with Billtrust.

Cash Flow Velocity Starts with Guiding Your Buyers

Your buyers’ payment experience directly impacts your cash cycle. In fact, it’s the beginning of it. A self-service B2B payment solution that makes it hard to find the information they need only confuses them and forces unnecessary phone calls. Phone calls are tiny friction points that have a trickle-down effect on AR efficiency, cash forecast accuracy, and, ultimately, working capital.

The Billtrust Buyer Payment Portal offers more information, clear recommendations, and a guided payment experience, making it one of the strongest investments an AR team can make.

Better buyer guidance leads to faster payments, which leads to more accurate forward-looking cash visibility, which leads to better financial planning decisions. It’s all connected, and our B2B payment solution makes it easy.

Take a tour of the Buyer Payment Portal or ask for personalized demonstration.