This post was originally published in August 2022 and was updated with additional information in September 2025 to reflect the latest insights on accounts receivable and AP Portals.
For medical suppliers, getting paid is becoming increasingly complex. As hospitals, surgical centers, and medical practice customers mandate the use of accounts payable (AP) portals—each with their own preferred system—accounts receivable (AR) teams are trapped in a web of manual uploads and inefficiency. The solution is to evolve your AR practice through true medical AP portal automation.
Sticking with the status quo presents a set of flawed choices. Let’s break down why conventional approaches are a dead end for modern healthcare invoice management.
Why Conventional Approaches Fail at Healthcare Invoice Management
1. The EDI Problem
On the surface, building your own custom Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) connection to each customer portal can seem like a smart solution. In reality, it can quickly turn into a process that may take months as internal resources will be needed for development and ongoing maintenance. The work may never be complete. New portals continuously arise, and existing ones are known for changing their requirements as upgrades, security policies, and regulatory compliance evolve.
Furthermore, even if you solve the initial EDI challenge, your team will still have to manually log back into each portal to check the status of an invoice (e.g., disputed, paid, or rejected), undermining the goal of full automation.
Finance departments taking this path should be prepared for resource commitments to combat the risk of potential technical debt.
2. Hidden Risks of Manually Keying Invoices into AP Portals
The most common reaction is to throw people at the problem. Most finance leaders assign additional staff to hand key invoices into dozens (even hundreds) of unique AP portals. But as companies grow and the popularity of AP portals increases, this approach is unsustainable. Repetitive manual work is labor-intensive and subject to human error. Typos and files submitted incorrectly lead to invoice rejections, payment delays, and disputes—all of which only multiply the workload.
This isn’t the only obstacle if your goal is to reduce AR overhead in your medical supply chain. More manual work for AR teams can deteriorate employee morale, increase turnover, and rob the team of time needed for more high-value work like analysis and customer engagement. For CFOs, these hidden costs of manual work often amount to direct threats to operational efficacy and cash flow performance underscoring financial health.
3. Point Solution Perils
Recognizing these flaws, many leaders turn to third-party technology providers. However, choosing a point solution can mean trading one set of problems for another. For instance, many software providers cannot offer integration at the mass scale necessary to automate invoice uploads into hundreds of AP portals.
Billtrust’s AR automation platform delivers pre-built integrations for 260+ AP portals.
Another integration problem: Point solutions may not seamlessly connect with your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. As a result, fragmented data can require more IT intervention to support the specialized needs of AR operations. Explore four reasons why AR automation beats ERP systems alone.
A 2025 Vanson Bourne Research Study highlighted that 55% of finance professionals identify integrating AR systems with other platforms, such as ERP, as one of their biggest challenges in automating AR processes.
The Rise of Intelligent Invoicing and Medical AP Portal Automation
Today’s advancements in AI facilitate medical AP portal automation, establishing smarter approaches for billing across a vast number of AP portals. This way invoices are entered accurately on time and in the proper format for each portal. AI-powered AP portal automation solutions are also great for relationship building — showing your customers that you’re happy to embrace their mandates.
Recognizing the Best AP Portal Automation
Financial decision-makers must be able to recognize advanced platforms. Advanced solutions should do much more than simply offer a proof of delivery that your invoice has been sent to an AP portal. Look for these key features:
- Automatic status updates delivered to a central AR management dashboard
- 24/7 access to review submitted invoices
- The ability to carry out quick exception handling if any issues arise
- Monitor every step of the approval process for each invoice
- The ability to resend an invoice and submit a corrected invoice as many times as needed
- Most importantly, maintained integration with a vast number of AP Portals and the ability to expand with additional connections
Advanced solutions should do much more than simply offer a proof of delivery that your invoice has been sent to an AP portal.
Billtrust’s Invoicing solution includes AP Portal Delivery and acts as an intelligent engine for invoice data generation and portal uploads. Simply send your invoices to one centralized platform, and our AI-driven workflow handles the complex tasks of reformatting and delivering each invoice according to the unique requirements of 260+ AP portals. Even if one of your buyers has built their own AP portal (with its own unique requirements), Billtrust can accommodate special connections. Our integration experts can set you up, so you can also deliver invoices seamlessly into every system.
Save 10 minutes per AP Portal invoice. On average, Billtrust’s clients gain 10 minutes of productivity for each invoice uploaded into an AP portal.
No More Silos: The Difference Unified Management Makes
Most medical supply companies have different systems and teams dealing with invoices and collections, and adding AP portals to the mix only compounds the problems of data fragmentation. Invoicing and collections functions serve as the right and left hands of the financial operation. When their operational data is disconnected, workloads become heavy due to misalignments.
For example, invoices inside an AP portal might be submitted and approved by the buyer but appear delinquent to the supplier. Without deep integrations giving collectors real-time access to the invoice and payment status, collections efforts are wasted. This disconnect can lead to unnecessary confusion and poor customer experiences.
Integration and unified data management are the answers. Here’s how Billtrust connects the dots:
- Customized Invoice Delivery: It starts with getting the invoice delivered correctly the first time, formatted for each unique portal to drastically reduce rejections.
- Integrated Dispute Resolution: If a dispute occurs, the issue is automatically logged as a dispute management case inside the Billtrust AR platform. This way it’s visible to all AR stakeholders including employees working across invoicing, payments, cash application, collections, and credit functions. Billtrust also pulls in all relevant documentation for transparency and rapid, collaborative resolution.
- Streamlined Digital Payments: Accelerate cash flow by including direct payment links in invoices and notifications, allowing buyers to pay immediately via their preferred methods (ACH, card, etc.) through Billtrust’s integrated Payments automation platform.
- Automated Cash Application: The AR process continues in automated cash application. Because the payment is tied to the initial invoice (tracked simultaneously in the AP portal and in Billtrust’s Invoicing system), our AI engine can post the payment automatically with straight-through processing that eliminates manual work.
Unified approaches provide a single source of truth, delivering productivity gains for AR managers and holistic reporting for finance leaders and CFOs demanding more accurate performance measurement and cash flow forecasting.
Healthcare and life sciences companies reduce DSO by 12 days on average with holistic AR automation software.
Proof in Practice: A Medical Supplier’s AR Digital Transformation
Ossur, the global leader in orthopedics, struggled with proof of invoice delivery and worked with Billtrust to enhance AR efficiency. See how they addressed limited data visibility, payment delays, and a subpar customer experience. Read the full story.
AP Portal Automation: Billtrust’s 3 Biggest Differentiators
Billtrusts empowers AR teams with insights and automation that simple tools cannot replicate. Our solution is built on three core differentiators:
- Decades of Financial & Medical Expertise: We have over 20 years of B2B financial domain expertise built into our AI automation platform. Serving 200 healthcare and life science companies every day, including 20 of the top medical device and supply companies, we solve the specific, nuanced challenges that AR professionals face every day.
- Unmatched Network Data: Our AI learns from the industry’s largest network of buyer-supplier relationships. We process roughly $1T invoice transactions annually on behalf of our clients. This intelligence creates a virtuous cycle of continuous learning that makes our models smarter with every new transaction.
- Collaborative AI Agents: Billtrust’s AI is an ecosystem of specialized agents that collaborate across your entire order-to-cash cycle, delivering coordinated intelligence instead of disconnected insights.
Instead of a simple “invoice sent” confirmation, our platform delivers:
- Smarter Decision-making: Analytics dashboards provide real-time visibility into cash flow, efficiency, and AR performance metrics. You can pinpoint which AP portals cause payment delays, identify trends in buyer behavior, and use data-driven insights to refine your strategies and directly impact metrics like electronic delivery (eDelivery) rate and upload exception rate.
- Proactive Risk Management: Gain holistic visibility into your order-to-cash cycle to identify early indicators of financial risk. Plus, our platform is built on a foundation of enterprise-grade security and rigorous controls to protect your sensitive financial data.
- Global Compliance: For suppliers doing business across the world, our solution is designed to ensure compliance with evolving global mandates on eInvoicing, de-risking your operations so you can sell with confidence across borders.
Accommodating AP Portals is Easier than You Think
For medical suppliers, the challenges of dealing with AP portals might seem daunting, but specialized AP portal automation solutions can overcome them. Want to see how Billtrust’s invoicing platform can transform your AR operations? Ask about our Quickstart solutions when you contact our medical industry specialists at [email protected].
