Following the SVB crisis, we helped our customers go through their hardest weekend in years. I'm sharing here some key notes and learnings. In light of recent events around SVB, suppliers who receive payments through SVB accounts should act quickly to avoid any delays or lost payments. Due to the fact that many of our customers held accounts in SVB, we found ourselves at the heart of the current potential crisis. Monto has been monitoring the event from its very inception, including being fully active in the past weekend, and has taken key actions for our customers to mitigate losses. Currently, there are millions of dollars open in accounts receivable for businesses that have been affected by SVB's recent disruptions, and we have succeeded in helping our customers direct millions of dollars to their new banks, as well as canceling transactions before it’s too late. We collected key actions and insights from the past few days and gathered them for everyone to know and act on their own, if needed. A reminder: many companies use AP platforms to pay their suppliers. Some of the most popular AP platforms include Coupa, Ariba, SAP Concur, and Bill.com. Businesses that use those platforms are forcing their suppliers to submit invoices and track their payment status through those platforms, which involves tedious manual processes. If you're a supplier who receives payments through SVB accounts, here are some tips to ensure a smooth transition to your new bank account: Change Bank Details: The only sure thing today is that it is uncertain whether deposits in SVB will be attained in full. Therefore, it is recommended to stop incoming payments to these banks. If you have a second bank to direct payments to, we suggest changing all bank details on the different AP platforms/supplier portals of your customers. Update Your Invoices: Update the bank account details on your invoices to ensure that payments are directed to your new bank account. Contact your customers: Communicate with your customers via email or phone to let them know that you are not accepting payments in your SVB account, only in your new bank account. Cancel submitted invoices: If you would like to stop the processing of the invoices that were submitted to the supplier portals but not paid yet- You should try to cancel them all in the portals. Note: Some portals enable this option. By following these tips, suppliers can avoid any potential delays or lost payments as a result of SVB's recent disruptions. We did so for many of our customers. Monto helps our customers to avoid any lost payment by providing an automatic collections solution. This includes updating bank account details across all AP platforms and invoices and staying in full control and visibility over it. With Monto, suppliers can ensure that their accounts receivable are up-to-date and accurate, reducing the risk of delays or lost payments. AP platforms are widely used by mid-market and enterprise companies to manage their accounts payable processes and pay their suppliers. With millions of dollars open in accounts receivable, it's important for suppliers to perform these crucial actions on all AP platforms and invoices and to communicate with their customers to verify the change to their new bank account. By following the tips above and using tools like Monto, suppliers can avoid losing millions of payments from customers. Our team of experts is here to support startups in collecting payments from enterprise customers. Just reach out to us at supportstartups@montopay.com, and we'll be happy to help, answer open questions and ensure you are getting paid.

BLEND Voice partners with Monto to collect payments X2 faster from their largest enterprise companies BLEND is a global localization platform that aims to remove cross-border barriers for global businesses KPIs: Challenge BLEND voice helps companies localize their business based on a unique understanding of local context, culture, subtlety, and consumer behavior. As a growing tech company, they are expanding their work, scaling globally, and having multiple projects with the largest enterprise customers. This commits their finance team to bill more invoices to multiple customers and adjust their billing and collections processes according to each customer. For every customer, the finance team needs to deliver invoices across different Accounts Payable software (AP Portals) and monitor incoming payments. Working with so many different customers’ AP Portals, doubled their workload and increased the likelihood of errors. Learning how to manage these systems and use them in your day-to-day work is time-consuming. BLEND voice needed a system that would adapt itself to the different AP portals and will submit invoices automatically as fast as possible while minimizing errors. As BLEND voice is growing, its billing and collection process becomes more complex, and they shouldn’t spend so much time adjusting its revenue processes to its customers and billing according to each customer's requirements. Solution BLEND voice decided to partner with Monto to cut their manual work and time-consuming processes, freeing up the finance team's time to focus on scaling and improving collections processes. Using Monto’s advanced technology, BLEND voice is automatically billing AP portals and getting full visibility by seeing updates on the billed invoices. In Monto’s platform, BLEND voice can see clearly all the issues that need to be resolved, getting actionable insights on stuck invoices, without spending time on invoices’ investigating. Results BLEND voice’s status after using Monto for only 3 months: Monto allows BLEND voice to view all the invoices that were scattered across AP portals in one place. Without logging in to multiple platforms, Blend voice sees the most important information including purchase orders, invoices, and payments. The automatic invoice-to-AP portal process, together with the growing visibility, enabled Blend to save an average of 5 hours a week. Now, BLEND’s finance team has much more time for the most important tasks a computer can’t replace. The higher invoice acceptance rates BLEND experienced with Monto were made possible by Monto’s smart engine that learns each customer's requirements and adjusts invoice submission accordingly. Monto optimizes accurate invoicing and makes smarter actions instantly, which helps BLEND to bill invoices with 70% fewer rejections on AP portals with no extra effort. With powerful invoicing intelligence, BLEND could improve its customer experience by reducing unnecessary invoice rejections With Monto, Blend voice’s collections days are reduced by 47%! Usually, companies at scale like Blend voice suffers from complex billing process that involves different stakeholders and is prone to human errors. By minimizing disputes and invoice rejections, Monto enables Blend to get paid X2 faster. Monto’s automatic invoice-to-AP portal process has proved itself more efficient, enabling Blend voice’s customers to receive their invoices faster, approve them earlier, and of course, make the payment even before the due date! (/ASAP).

AppsFlyer partners with Monto to automatically collect payments from customers’ AP platforms AppsFlyer helps thousands of companies to power predictable app growth, protect customer privacy, and deliver exceptional mobile experiences. KPIs: Challenge “Adjusting our billing processes over and over again is impossible!” When the mobile industry started growing over a decade ago, the app economy took off, but marketers, developers, and product managers had no way of accurately measuring the success of their work. Recognizing this gap in the market, AppsFlyer was established to provide a solution. Today, the company empowers thousands of businesses worldwide to achieve predictable app growth, protect customer privacy, and deliver exceptional mobile experiences. As the company expanded its client base, the billing and collection process became increasingly complex. With over 200 customers utilizing AP portals, the AppsFlyer’s Accounts Receivable (AR) team had to navigate more than 200 different processes across 45 different systems. With a 10% increase in the number of customers utilizing these portals each month, it quickly became impossible for the team to manually adjust the process for each new customer. To address this challenge, AppsFlyer needed a system that adapts to each customer's unique requirements, providing a completely automated invoice submission process with minimal errors. They needed a system that enables the company to manage all of its online billing and collections through various AP portals, consolidating the data into a single, unified system. This would allow the team to stay on top of payments and keep up with the increasing demand from their customers. Solution “Monto is like the AR manager of our team. It directs us to focus on what is really important.” Partnering with Monto has helped AppsFlyer’s billing and collection process to become flexible and adaptable to the unique needs of each customer. With a one-click process, Monto's platform allows AppsFlyer to automatically collect payments through various AP portals, gain full visibility into the activity on these portals, and stay up-to-date with customer information. The AR team can now spend more time on important tasks, thanks to a 38% reduction in True Days Sales Outstanding (TDSO) and a 34% improvement in the approval rate. All of this enables AppsFlyer to turn their biggest pain point into an advantage, and makes them even more customer-friendly. Results Monto's smart engine adapts to each customer's needs, streamlining the invoice submission process. This optimization has led to a tremendous increase in AppsFlyer’s approval rate, which is now at an impressive 97%. With Monto, AppsFlyer’s AR team no longer needs to spend time troubleshooting rejection issues, as invoices are collected without any employee lifting a finger. “Monto makes sure our money arrives earlier than before.” Total Days Sales Outstanding (TDSO) measures how quickly a company collects payment for its invoices. The optimal TDSO of a company is based on the credit terms offered by the supplier. The more invoices not collected on time, the higher the TDSO. With Monto's platform, invoices are delivered as soon as they are issued, and invoice rejections are prevented with accurate invoicing. Today, AppsFlyer enjoys a new reality where collections from portals are made automatically and on time! “Monto’s system is giving us back a lot of time to focus on collection.” AP portals can streamline communication between suppliers and buyers, but require a lot of manual work from suppliers. AppsFlyer’s AR team used to spend hours manually uploading invoices and then tracking them, dealing with rejections, and communicating with buyers through AP portals with different interfaces. This manual work was time-consuming and burdensome. But since implementing Monto, the AR team no longer has to deal with this tedious manual work. Monto's automated system handles it all, freeing up the AR team to focus on more important tasks, creating happier employees.

Here’s a common situation: A B2B supplier sells a product/service, the customer is satisfied and really pleased with what they got, but the supplier doesn't receive payment. As peculiar as it may seem, this is a common situation for accounts receivable (or billing and payment collection) teams. In this article, we will depict, at a high level, the process of getting paid. While we see this process as a simple one with three easy steps, companies and their finance teams, view billing and collection as a real nightmare with infinite steps and problems. And it shouldn't be a bad dream! Securing cash flow is crucial for businesses, and doing so should be an easy, fast, and even fun task for finance teams, which should be afforded more time to obtain insightful data about customers and propel the company to new heights. Before we start, let’s remember the goal (the A/R team’s goal): getting paid. 3 simple steps to get invoices paid (or not...): Issuing an invoice (actually, before issuance) - Issuing the invoice file is easy and can be done using any number of tools or even manually. The real issue here is to be 100% in sync with every customer about every invoice. Firstly, the particulars in the invoice must be totally clear, correct, and without typos: currencies, addresses, names, items - everything matters. Furthermore, the invoice must include specific details that differ from one customer to another. In many cases, the invoice must also correspond to a purchase order (PO) - an internal document from the customer about the order. Effect - Every aspect we have mentioned and more of the same can cause an invoice to be rejected, requiring the entire billing process to start over, sometimes 50-60 days after the original issuance. When purchasing, many companies assume the net terms will only start after a valid invoice has been sent to them. Errors can result in a 100-day invoice, even though its terms were 30 net. Communicating with your customers and their accounts payable team - Although issuing an invoice can get messy, it is a relatively simple process. However, communicating with customers can be much more challenging. As companies grow, they employ an A/P department to take care of all supplier payments, with operations such as collecting invoices payable, paying suppliers, monitoring cash flow, and forecasting expenses. Communication with customers and their A/P teams can include problems with invoices, payment issues, inquiries about past actions, and more. The only sure thing about these communications is that each customer communicates differently, in some way. Effect - This task can be arduous for B2B suppliers and their A/R teams as they find themselves spending hundreds of hours working on many different communication channels such as emails, phone, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, and, more recently, supplier/vendor portals that companies are starting to make their payments from. This creates a lot of work for the A/R team, causing them to suffer from busy-work (or “stupid” work) with dozens of different systems, most of which are outdated. The A/P software market is, in fact, exploding with many different SaaS providers offering software to digitize this area of business within companies (Divvy, Brex, Coupa, SAP Ariba, Tipalti, and hundreds of others). Verifying payments / Cash application - Cash application is when the A/R team uses bank statements, payment statements from customers, and optionally, other data like “they said they paid on the phone” and similar, and then signs the invoice (the open A/R) as paid. This is where the process concludes, and everyone can breathe and go to sleep (not really, you still have 200 other open invoices!). First, the cash application specialists need to identify who the customer is. This could be by name, by the reference number the customer added (never happens), by the transaction amount, or by any other creative idea they can come up with. Next, they need to verify for which invoice the payment was made. Effect - Imagine you’re selling a subscription with the same amount each month to a group of customers. How do you know which invoice the cash should be applied to? This is a very complicated (and in the existing situation, sometimes impossible) process, involving numerous data sources from banks and customers. Again, the result is hundreds of hours of internal manual processes and unnecessary communications with customers who have already paid. Money collection is a demanding task for B2B suppliers and their finance and A/R teams. BUT it shouldn’t have to stay that way. The process of getting paid is simple in concept, and with today’s technologies, there is support available for companies eager to streamline their processes. At Monto, we're excited to be at the forefront of making this complex, wasteful process a thing of the past. #AccountsReceivable #Billing #Collections #reduceDSO #BYEBYEDelayedPayments

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If you are a salesperson or an A/R manager, you should probably read this. Collecting payments is a struggle for any finance department, with many hurdles cropping up throughout the process. Often, the very first problem starts in the sales department. Salespeople are super-focused on revenue and new customers. And they should! After all, the sales team's goal is to convert leads, get the commission, and move on to the next lead. With that said, there are a few small actions they could take and save their company thousands of extra dollars in the future. Every time the sales team fails to acquire essential information about the customer at the beginning of the contract, it creates more manual work for the A/R team later on. More and more problems pop up down the line and, ultimately, your company experiences a massive increase in delayed payments. That’s why B2B companies need to foster a tight-knit relationship between their sales and finance teams. By working together and making some simple tweaks to internal processes, you can benefit from faster, more seamless transactions. We’ve spoken to our A/R experts to get their top tips. Here’s what they recommend: Tip #1 - Map out your customer’s finance unit Whenever a sale is closed, ensure the sales team asks the new customer the following questions: Who is the billing contact? Who approves the payments? Is there someone who has to sign the invoice before it goes to accounts payable? Do you use a vendor portal? Should we submit your invoices online to an A/P portal? If the A/R team receives disputes, who should we approach in your organization? If the sales team does not get the necessary information to contact the customer later on, a payment can end up 40-45 days past due. Ensure the sales team gets answers to these important questions as soon as possible. That includes knowing whether to send the invoice to a supplier portal, a specific person, or to accounting@companyname.com. At the end of the day, if the sales team does not give this detail the proper attention, ARR will not be able to turn into cash! Tip #2 - POs should be forwarded directly to the A/R team Usually, A/R teams find themselves in back-and-forth correspondence with their customers’ AP department looking for a PO number. In cases where the customer maintains a purchase order for every payment, you often can’t submit an invoice without that PO number, either manually or online. Invoices that are not raised “by-the-book” and submitted in the exact manner the customer requests, will likely be rejected. This will undoubtedly have a direct impact on delayed payments. From talking to customers, we have found out that the PO is typically already sitting in the inbox of your AE or CSM team! Cut out the unnecessary chasing by ensuring POs are forwarded directly to the A/R team. Tip #3 - Define the bank account policy The bank account you get paid to needs to be the same account that appears on the invoice. The sales team must ensure that they provide the customer with the correct bank account details and entity to which you want to receive payment. Enlist the help of the AE, as they can help you make sure your customers know where to send the payment. Facilitate your customers whenever you can. Tip #4 - Make friends in the right places As the outward faces of your company, it’s the role of the AE and CSM teams to build relationships with customers, which in turn can improve the collection processes. As an A/R manager, you need to make sure you are a good friend to these people within your organization, to ensure any hurdles you might run into are dealt with smoothly and amicably. In return, you can provide your AE friends with some amazing insights into the customers by virtue of your relationship with their AP or procurement teams. Make connections wisely! The simple question to faster collections By building the right internal relationships, making simple changes to the internal process, and mapping out the financial flow of an invoice for each buyer, you can save thousands of dollars and reduce the time your team spends chasing payments. Even adding the simple question of “Who is the billing contact?” to your customers’ agreement can make life for an A/R team a little bit easier. Stay tuned if you're looking for more insights about collections and modern A/R challenges. We continue our research in Monto every week, and we keep our blogs updated.

Join us for a special series of A/R leaders, where we hear about best practices, tips, and more from Accounts Receivable leaders! And today we are featuring... Parul is a credit controller and order-to-cash specialist with expertise in collections and customer management. She has vast experience across billings and collections and managing accounts receivable teams. At Amazon, Parul heads up the Collections Team, made up of six employees who each manages individual portfolios and ensures Amazon is paid on time. Parul drives relationships with key stakeholders internally and externally, including the sales departments and customers. "I’m a people person, so it’s important for me to help customers and find solutions to their problems." Does your team set goals or KPIs? Yes. I always establish smart, measurable goals and ensure my team works according to them. We work out what we can expect to collect by the end of the month and work towards that. KPIs are also set to ensure any invoice beyond 30 days past due is managed. If invoices are not getting paid, we have internal processes that help us explain the reason and find creative solutions. What are the top areas you focus on as an A/R manager? From my experience, an A/R manager should prioritize three main areas: Motivating the A/R team ‒ A/R employees are part of the core of the finance team. Their work combines manual tasks requiring precision and attention with reaching targets and important KPIs, and reporting on those at the end of every week/month/quarter/year. I’m always working on my relationship with my team, so that I can listen to their problems and motivate them personally and professionally. Building relations ‒ besides building connections with the team, the most challenging part of the job is the money collection aspect. It’s essential to connect to your customers and build relationships with them, to make this part easier. Be highly approachable to customers to reach out to you. Keeping on top of numbers ‒ I always look at the portfolio at the beginning of the month and ensure I have measurable goals. Then, I confirm that my team is aware of them, and I get a view of what to expect to collect by the end of the month. "I feel connected to this role because I am up for the challenges that come with it; there is always a new problem to resolve and payment to collect." Do you have any tips for A/R managers? Collections is a stressful, demanding job, so take care of your team and make sure they are motivated and up for challenges. To be sure that your team knows what they are doing, make sure you meet every member at least once a week, go over their portfolio and open A/R, and ask them: What were your successes last week? What are your pain points? Do you need any help? Want to contribute your knowledge to the community and write your blog post? -> reach out to us at hello@montopay.com