About Invoiced by Flywire: Invoiced by Flywire delivers cloud-based accounts receivable (A/R) automation to B2B organizations via AI-powered invoicing, collections, and cash application.
In business, growth happens quickly; at least if you’re lucky. And each time you tap into a new market, set up an office in a new territory, or start accepting a new currency or payment type, your A/R operations will need to adapt.
It can be tempting to set up one-off systems and processes for these additions when they occur, particularly if you need to react quickly to an emerging market. Unfortunately, a piecemeal approach often leads to duplicated processes, integration challenges, and overall waste. Instead, by being proactive and setting up a scalable, automated A/R strategy before you grow, you can accommodate new currencies, tax regulations, and process workflows with ease.
Of course, not all automation platforms are created equally, which is why in this article, we’ll explore some critical capabilities you’ll want to look for when considering a potential Invoice-to-Cash (I2C) automation solution. We’ll specifically look at why integrated payments, straight-through processing, multi-currency support, and reconciliation automation can determine whether your A/R bends or breaks when you enter a new market.
Key insight: Scalable A/R doesn’t just happen; you need to plan for it. Fortunately, there are platforms on the market right now that can flesh out your billing and payments operations, leveraging smart automation and the right features to simplify today’s workflows and tomorrow’s growth.
- With payments embedded into A/R software, , adding new territories means updating a setting, not managing dozens of new payment partners.
- Multi-currency support opens the door to customers everywhere.
- Automated reconciliation does the heavy lifting, so your A/R team doesn’t have to.
Why It Seems Easier to Rebuild Accounts Receivable Operations Every Time You Expand
Key insight: Businesses operating globally routinely reported up to twice as many per-transaction challenges as their domestic-only peers, while 89% of respondents in a 2022 Flywire survey believed tighter enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration would save them money on cross-border receivables.
Much of that friction comes from A/R that was built for one market and bolted onto the next, an all-too-common occurrence as effective planning takes time and energy, two resources that are often in short supply. For instance, when dealing with a single buyer that has a unique processing requirement—such as an atypical currency or payment type—many businesses will revert to manual processing or set up some supplemental operation to force the transactions into the traditional workflow.
Similarly, when an untapped market opens with multiple buyers suddenly requiring novel reconciliation, tax administration, or other support, A/R teams rarely will have the resources to build and staff an entirely new processing infrastructure from scratch. Instead, they’ll try to co-opt as much as possible from existing workflows and again rely on ad hoc, often manual efforts to bridge any gaps. And this disjointed approach, in turn, will result in duplicated processes and isolated data silos that make it difficult to gain an enterprise-wide understanding of company financials.
Rather than a decision made in the moment, putting in place scalable A/R requires planning, forethought, and a flexible platform. You’ll want to investigate markets and areas where you’re planning to expand and identify problem areas in advance. You’ll also need to invest in a solution that offers flexible workflows and comprehensive customization that can bridge any existing or emerging process, data, and integration shortfalls quickly and easily.
Key takeaway: New markets shouldn’t mean new problems. Instead, build an A/R strategy that can easily adapt to the needs of your business in the moment, no matter where you start working.
The 4 Core Elements of Accounts Receivable Automation Software That Scales Globally
Growth often happens across broader regions, particularly if national borders run closer together. You might find yourself coordinating with new national governments, payment networks, and currencies in rapid succession, and a disjointed approach will undermine the potential of this growing success with each new region.
If you want to truly be prepared, you need an A/R automation platform that can scale globally. One accommodates localized payment types and currencies, and is integrated with the ERP platforms that you work with. One that’s able to do business anywhere at any time—just like you. One that offers:
#1: Integrated Payments: Build The Payment Layer Into A/R, Not Around It
When a payments platform is integrated with the A/R layer, you can extend your existing technology investments. When that critical information is readily available, you can achieve:
- Faster, if not real-time payment settlements
- Stabilized cash flows
- Greater visibility for forecasting
- Reduced administrative burdens
- Simplified financial closings
Key takeaway: When you embrace an integrated payments approach, adding new territories, currencies, or payment types means updating a setting, not your entire architecture.
#2: Straight-Through Processing: Design For Zero-Touch By Default
Every time your employees manually touch your billing or payments data, it costs you money either through direct labor or from the potential fallout of human errors. Even worse, this approach means that your A/R is labor-dependent, so if you experience a spike in sales, your invoicing will slow down until your workers can catch up or you add the necessary staff, oftentimes a time-consuming process.
With straight-through processing, however, the technology oversees your operations from invoicing to dunning, to payment processing, to reconciliation, all without human intervention. Even exceptions, like disputes or short payments, are typically flagged and resolved with minimal oversight. And when you see that hoped-for billing surge, your solution will simply need to dedicate more processing power, no waiting needed.
Key takeaway: Your growth shouldn’t depend on hiring. Higher straight-through rates make that possible.
#3: Multi-Currency Support: Treat Currency As Configuration, Not Customization
Reliable, cost-effective currency conversion is one of the key challenges for businesses that accept cross-border payments. Each time a presentment currency is translated into a settlement currency, or vice versa, fees are introduced.
With a system that natively delivers multi-currency invoicing and billing support, however, you can navigate these transfers seamlessly without any additional labor, or chasing short payments. And as new currencies are added to the mix, you don’t need to build out new payment networks and regional banking relationships every time. The platform does the work for you.
Key takeaway: Stop building payment networks from scratch. Choose a solution with the global reach you need from day one.
#4: Reconciliation Automation: Automate Matching Across Currencies, Short Pays, And Remittance Formats
If you haven’t yet automated your global accounts receivable efforts, potentially the most labor-intensive phase of your I2C cycle will be surrounding reconciliation. For each incoming payment, your staff must hunt down the relevant invoice documentation to ensure that your business is being fully compensated. In cases of short payment, dispute, foreign currency, or other issues, accurate cash application becomes significantly more complicated.
For these more involved A/R efforts, many businesses have begun to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their ERP systems. By leveraging this technology, users can complete these matching efforts in mere seconds and with fewer errors than when handled by human staff. Even better, with reconciliation completed in near-real time, companies can leverage this more accurate financial data to promote predictive analytics, such as more accurate cash flow forecasting.
Key takeaway: Manual reconciliation can’t easily fill a global footprint. Fortunately, AI can.
What Scalable A/R Global Automation Looks Like In Practice
The goal of scalable A/R global automation is that your business reaches a point where it teeters on the edge of explosive growth. Buyers from multiple new markets, some you’ve never even heard of, line up to purchase your products. This also means you need to meet their expectations before local competitors snatch away that business.
If you’ve relied on a piecemeal approach for your international accounts receivable, you’ve got a problem. For each new geography, you’ll need to build out new integrations with your existing ERP platform and possibly purchase localized accounting software that can navigate regional tax and financial regulations. To process payments in the native currency, you’ll likely have to set up new vendor relationships with local banks or farm this out to local payment processors, who will require their own cut of the profits. And as these funds hit your accounts, you’ll need to dedicate a non-trivial portion of your staff to calculating and verifying that these incoming transactions accurately reflect the amount owed on your invoices and balance sheets. Altogether, you’ll be facing a significant labor demand and extended deployment timelines measured in weeks if not months.
Conversely, if you’ve embraced global scalability, your A/R platform can absorb this growth seamlessly. Your integrated payments layer can introduce new currencies, tax codes, and reporting requirements within your existing ERP workflows almost instantly, with no need to build out new integration channels. Straight-through processing removes your staff from the equation, meaning that your technology keeps pace with the growth, not your hiring processes. Native multi-currency invoicing and payment support allows you to become financially agnostic so that the region where a transaction originates is largely irrelevant. An AI-powered cash application ensures that these new funding streams show up where they’re supposed to in mere seconds across your entire back office.
| Piecemeal A/R | Global A/R | |
| Deployment timelines | Days to weeks | Hours to days |
| Back-office data sharing | Manual transcription, segregated workflows | Seamless, real-time integration with existing assets |
| Staff involvement | Requires support at multiple stages | Minimal touches through automation |
| Multi-currency support | Needs new financial relationships built each time | Leverages an established global payment network |
| Reconciliation | Labor-intensive, involving manual exceptions | Driven by AI and automation |
Planning for the Future of Accounts Receivable Operations
If current trends hold, nearly every industry will continue to see an uptick in cross-border sales alongside consumer expectations for a more seamless, responsive payment experience. They’ll expect instant notifications that their funds have been received and applied, yielding a zero balance on their accounts—even if they’re on the other side of the globe. They’ll want control over which currencies and payment types they use, picking the option that works best for them in the moment. And if you want to survive, you’ll have to proactively accommodate this growing list of demands.
You’ll want to leverage agentic AI to handle complex processes—like reconciliation—and their corresponding exceptions in seconds. You’ll need the platform flexibility to accommodate emerging fintechs and payment types, such as stablecoins and other blockchain-driven models. You’ll require a global payment network that can settle cross-border transactions without hassle while remaining compliant. You’ll need greater financial transparency, particularly as legislatures across the globe strive to create more equitable reporting and monitoring standards.
Why Invoiced By Flywire Is Your Ideal Global Accounts Receivable Platform
Ultimately, how efficiently you respond to future growth will depend on your actions in the present. With a flexible invoicing and payments platform, such as our Accounts Receivable Automation solution, you can effectively prepare for the future, making it easy to deliver unprecedented choice to your customers by accepting a broad range of payment types and currencies. And the financial data generated by these sales will be readily available across the entire enterprise, thanks to out-of-the-box integration support for thousands of ERP, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), and business systems.
By leveraging the integrated global payment capabilities of Flywire software, our platform can accommodate 140 different currencies spent across 240 countries and territories. And those funds will be reflected in the right accounts, balances, and invoices in a matter of seconds, thanks to our CashMatch AI. Further, our straight-through processing capabilities help ensure that those payments will be handled independently of your staff, requiring their input only for rare exceptions or final authorizations.
So, if you’d like to better prepare for the future of A/R, schedule a demo today.
FAQ:
What is accounts receivable infrastructure?
Put simply, accounts receivable infrastructure refers to the underlying technology and business systems used to support the billing for and collection of money tied to credit-based purchases. These functions may include invoice creation, dunning, dispute management, payment processing, cash application, reporting, accounting, and tax withholding, among others.
How do integrated payments support A/R growth?
Robust integration makes it possible to establish a single point of truth for your entire back office, eliminating the need to repeatedly update sales and transactional details in multiple systems. Instead, your accounting, shipping, accounts receivable, sales, and customer management platforms all rely on the same set of data and can access and update these details as needed for the entire enterprise. This efficiency, in turn, eliminates much of the labor needed to support A/R growth as the systems manage the data rather than your employees.
What is straight-through processing in accounts receivable?
Straight-through processing addresses transactions that are initiated and completed with little to no human intervention, essentially eliminating the manual data entry, approvals, and handoffs that unnecessarily slow down operations and introduce potential errors. This approach results in more efficient payment efforts that can readily scale independent of available labor as transaction volumes and markets grow.
Why is supporting multiple currencies a challenge within accounts receivable?
When a sale is billed for and paid for in different currencies, these funds will need to be converted between the two types—often by a third party—which will introduce additional costs and processing delays. At the same time, since conversion rates are dynamic, the realized value in an exchange will typically yield minor revenue increases or shortfalls that need to be properly accounted for, particularly at scale. Further, each new currency also suggests a new governmental authority overseeing the transaction, which will have in place its own independent tax, reporting, and accounting regulations that need to be met.
What advantages can AI deliver to cross-border payment reconciliation?
Traditionally, account reconciliation has been a labor-intensive enterprise, requiring users to sort through multiple documents—such as invoices, bank statements, remittances, shipping logs, and ledgers—to verify that these records all agree with the financial health and standing of your business. And when short payments, currency conversions, tax anomalies, or other challenges are introduced, rationalizing these statements becomes even more complicated. Fortunately, the data analytics and pattern recognition capabilities offered by artificial intelligence can dramatically accelerate this process, making it possible to collate, digest, and comprehend thousands of documents in mere seconds.
Invoiced by Flywire is Flywire’s accounts receivable automation platform, acquired by Flywire in 2024. Together, they form a single end-to-end solution: Invoiced by Flywire handles invoice delivery, collections workflows, and payment posting; Flywire’s payment infrastructure handles cross-border collection, currency conversion, and ERP reconciliation.
