Every finance leader wants real-time visibility into their cash flow — a living view of their company’s financial liquidity. So, at any moment, they know exactly what’s coming in, what’s going out, and what lies ahead – no chasing down answers or relying on outdated reports. But only a small fraction of organizations actually have this, according to a global study from Visa. The following features and capabilities are instrumental for obtaining real-time visibility into cash flow:
- Automated data capture that replaces slow, manual data management with instant transparency across invoicing, payments, and posting so you know exactly where your money stands at any given moment.
- AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics to forecast cash flow with greater accuracy, flag anomalies, and help teams act before issues impact liquidity.
- Integration enabling data flow between your ERPs, banking systems, digital lockboxes, AP portals, and more. This way even payment status outside your organization is available for financial analysis.
- A holistic platform for full visibility across the order-to-cash (O2C) cycle, connecting invoicing, payments, cash application, and collections into a single source of truth.
The best accounts receivable (AR) solutions can create this visibility, turning cash flow into a key enabler of business growth and innovation.
Why should I try to create real-time visibility into cash flow?
B2B suppliers that can see their cash flow in real-time are proven outperformers, facing fewer cash crunches and giving their company room to grow with more cash on hand for new investments. On the other hand, 83% of finance leaders recently polled by Forrester say poor cash visibility drives hidden costs, from team burnout to poor utilization of working capital. Nearly half admit it adds complexity at a time when agility, efficiency, and speed matter most.
Research shows 95% of finance leaders feel more pressure to protect and grow cash flow today.
Real-time visibility into cash flow gives companies ultimate control over their organization’s liquidity, working capital, and the ability to offset a variety of risks from macroeconomic factors to sudden changes in demand. Yet most companies rely on data that’s at least two weeks old when building their financial analysis and plans.
For these reasons, AR teams are tasked with strategic projects to improve real-time transparency. In response, finance leaders at companies large and small typically turn to AR automation software that integrates, automates, and leverages AI across every function of the AR for broader visibility. This explains why most seek out centralized management with an end-to-end platform that covers the entire order-to-cash process.
Let’s walk through the best AR solutions for real-time visibility into cash flow.
How does real-time visibility into cash flow improve team productivity?
Visa found that most organizations spend 250+ hours a week manually entering data to monitor their cash position, which is why reports are outdated by the time anyone reviews them.
Real-time cash flow visibility means data is automatically updated across systems
- When a customer payment posts, your ERP reflects it instantly
- When an invoice is sent or opened, your dashboard updates in real-time
- When a payment is logged in a client’s AP portal, your AR platform knows
- When a collector logs a promise-to-pay, your cash forecast adjusts automatically
Our customers see this impact. One client experienced productivity gains equivalent to 9 full-time employees. Another is saving 2000+ hours annually using our Cash Application automation solution with 3x higher ACH match rates.
How can automation be used to improve real-time visibility into cash flow?
Every step in the O2C cycle affects how clearly you can see it and therefore how quickly cash moves. Clarity facilitates speed, and automation creates clarity. It’s like taking a series of still frames and turning them into a flip book. Each automated step adds motion and clarity until you’re seeing cash flow as a living, moving story in real-time.
Invoicing automation software instantly creates invoices the moment an order closes, perfectly formatted to each customer’s requirements and delivered through their preferred channel. Billtrust can automate invoicing into virtually any AP portal with 260+ direct integrations, allowing AR teams to upload invoices automatically and monitor payment status live.
Payment automation software + a digital lockbox makes it easier for buyers to pay you and for you to receive and capture those payments from any channel. A unified AR solution like Billtrust allows buyers to pay online using different payment methods like ACH, credit cards, or virtual cards. Our Digital Lockbox works in step, streamlining the process by retrieving the funds, capturing remittance data, and sending it along to cash application workstreams.
Automated cash application software instantly applies payments to the correct invoices and posts them to your ERP. Automated cash application solutions use AI, optical character recognition (OCR), and Machine Learning to turn manual cash application procedures into a self-learning automation engine. Payments are captured, organized, and applied rapidly while the system constantly learns and refines – giving finance teams a real-time, reliable view of cash flow without the handwork.
Collections automation software fills one of the biggest visibility gaps in the O2C cycle: knowing which invoices remain outstanding. Instead of combing through spreadsheets or sending one-off emails, the system automatically tracks which customers owe what. Collectors work from a single dashboard that shows who’s paid, who’s late, and which accounts are likely to delay or default – all which plays a huge part of true cash flow visibility. Predictive insights are essential in using past payment behaviors to anticipate the likeliness of the cash inflow.
Compliance automation also plays a role in keeping cash visibility accurate and uninterrupted. When payment and invoicing processes automatically follow PCI DSS, tax, and eInvoicing requirements, your team doesn’t lose time managing exceptions, audits, or manual checks. Billtrust keeps sensitive data secure and compliant by design, capturing, storing, and transmitting payment information safely outside your environment so cash flow updates stay continuous and your data remains trustworthy.
How can AI be used to improve real-time visibility into cash flow?
While automation speeds up processes like invoicing, payment posting, and reconciliation, AI looks at all that live data to help you understand what’s happening in real-time so you can make more informed decisions that drive strategy and business growth. See how Generative AI and Agentic AI work for AR teams.
- Continuous data analysis. AI connects to live transaction data (from your ERP, bank feeds, AR systems, etc.) and updates dashboards instantly as money moves in or out.
- Pattern recognition. AI detects trends in customer payment behavior – who pays early, who pays late, and which accounts are slowing down – alerting you in real-time to potential risks that can affect your financial stability or cash position.
- Predictive forecasting. Real-time visibility tells you what’s true right now, while predictive forecasting tells you what’s about to be true. The two might seem unrelated, but they actually work together to keep your view of cash flow accurate and continuous. Your “real-time” cash position isn’t static. It’s constantly shifting as invoices are sent, payments are made, or delays occur. Without predictive insight, your real-time view is only a snapshot — accurate for the moment, but outdated the second conditions change. With predictive AI, your system anticipates what’s coming, updating your real-time dashboard with expected inflows and outflows as they develop.
- Anomaly detection. AI continuously monitors payments, invoices, and account activity across all your AR functions, flagging anything unusual that could affect cash flow. When something looks off, like an unexpected dip in payments or a missed remittance from a top customer, it flags it in real-time so you can act as quickly as possible.
- Agentic AI. AI agents can manage routine tasks like managing collector email inboxes. Plus they can analyze customer payment behaviors in real time and proactively suggest actions to optimize cash flow. By continuously learning and adapting, these agents help reduce Days Sales Outstanding to improve collections efficiency and help cash flow faster. See how Generative AI and Agentic AI work for AR teams.
Data siloes prevent real-time cash flow visibility – how do I integrate my ERP, banking, and AR systems?
Disparate systems create blind spots. When each tool updates on a different schedule and holds data in different formats, you’re always chasing fragmented data and trying to normalize the unstructured nature of information.
This is one of the biggest hurdles to achieving real-time visibility into cash flow, which is why it’s critical for AR solutions to layer machine learning and integration into current systems. Billtrust can connect all your financial data into a central data warehouse, cleaning up your data flow and ensuring everyone is working from the same, real-time picture of financial health, buyer behavior, and risk or opportunities.
With this single source of truth, AI can then get to work analyzing trends, patterns, and anomalies – doing all the stuff it does best – to create a living, intelligent view of cash flow that gets sharper with every transaction.
Data visibility only matters if it’s trustworthy.
In Visa’s global study (cited earlier), only 12% of organizations were extremely confident in the financial information in their systems to generate cash-flow visibility. This is why it’s so important to keep your data clean, connected, and consistent across every step of the O2C cycle. Automated, AI-driven AR solutions are purpose-built to do this, ensuring your view of cash flow is accurate down to the minute.
How can a holistic AR platform be used to improve real-time visibility into cash flow?
When invoicing, payments, cash application, and collections operate in separate systems, it’s nearly impossible to get a single, trustworthy view of where your cash actually stands. A holistic AR platform eliminates that problem.
By connecting every stage of the O2C cycle, a unified AR platform ensures data flows freely across all functions. The moment an invoice is sent, a payment is received, or a dispute is resolved, those updates appear everywhere at once. Finance leaders, collectors, and executives are all working from the same, current picture.
That level of integration creates true real-time visibility – not just within one process, but across the full lifecycle of cash movement. Teams no longer need to reconcile data across systems or wait for manual updates.
Instead, they can see:
- Which invoices are outstanding and when they were delivered.
- Which payments have cleared, and which are in process.
- Which payments are on hold due to an open dispute.
- Where cash is sitting, where it’s moving, and what’s projected next.
With a holistic platform like Billtrust, every data point along the O2C journey is captured, connected, and displayed in one place.
See how Billtrust’s unified AR automation solutions give you the real-time visibility and control your AR team needs. Talk to our experts today.
