Put simply, a business-to-business (B2B) payment refers to any purchasing transaction that occurs where both the buyer and seller are organizations (e.g., companies, non-profits, government agencies) rather than individuals. And unsurprisingly, B2B payments are big business.
In fact, according to a recent report from Precedence Research, the global B2B payments transaction market hit $1.58 trillion in 2024 and is projected to exceed $3.79 trillion by 2034. Much of this global growth is anticipated due to a steady increase in international trade, but for North America, it is predominantly expected due to the “availability of advanced infrastructure that helps facilitate online payment[s].”
Alongside these factors, the report also suggests that the advent of B2B payment automation solutions — such as accounts receivable (A/R) systems — will “create lucrative growth opportunities for the market.” In this article, we’ll cover some of the general elements of the B2B payments landscape. But for a deep dive into the topic, review our report: State of B2B Payments 2024: Acceleration, Automation, and AI.
What is B2B payment automation?
Unless you require cash at delivery, collecting a payment from another business is surprisingly complicated. You’ll need to track how much you’re owed, chase after outstanding payments, process transactions, apply incoming funds to the appropriate invoices and customer accounts, and accurately document this revenue in your financial reporting. B2B payment automation, in turn, describes the process of automating these tasks.
Why payment automation matters in 2025
In today’s environment of intensifying global competition, businesses face mounting financial pressures. Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping cost structures, unresolved trade disputes continue to threaten supply chains, and payment fraud risks are climbing. At the same time, cash flow is under strain: a 2024 PYMNTS report revealed that 42% of surveyed businesses had an average days sales outstanding (DSO) exceeding 60 days, while 60% said persistent payment delays were forcing them to seek outside funding to sustain growth.
Against this backdrop, automated payment solutions are no longer just operational upgrades — they are strategic necessities. By improving efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, payment automation helps organizations reduce friction, protect cash flow, and free up resources. Companies that adopt this technology position themselves to overcome financial challenges and secure a clear competitive advantage over those that do not.
Benefits of B2B payment automation
Obviously, whatever advantages you reap from automation will depend largely on the solution you choose. Not all offerings will deliver the same functionality, but they should ultimately enable you to handle your A/R and payment efforts more easily while investing less time and labor from your staff. With a solution in place, you can typically expect to:
- Eliminate human-caused errors: People make mistakes, and by removing them from the equation, automated systems encourage increased process and data accuracy.
- Accelerate revenue timelines: Workflow automation eliminates unnecessary delays between process steps and helps to more readily identify any bottlenecks that are slowing your payment efforts.
- Strengthen customer relationships: Having improved the accuracy and timeliness of your payment processing, customers will experience less friction when making purchases, encouraging higher satisfaction rates and repeat business.
- Streamline auditing and reporting: With a common, company-wide A/R workflow, you can effortlessly trace the status and timeline for each incoming transaction in real time, accurately documenting the necessary details per regulatory and industry demands.
- Simplify cash flow management: The clean data and metadata created by these solutions not only offer clearer insight into your current financial health but also make it easier to predict and prepare for future performance.
- Boost employee productivity and satisfaction: By offloading repetitive, mundane, time-consuming tasks onto the technology, you can free up your accounts staff to focus on more strategic, rewarding activities.
- Improve scalability: As market conditions shift or sales increase, you can right-size your A/R efforts by adding more processing power or software seats to your solution rather than needing to hire, onboard, and train new staff.
- Harden security and mitigate fraud: With automated processes, you can more quickly and easily identify and react to record discrepancies and other payment anomalies that suggest criminal malfeasance or other shenanigans.
- Support global transactions: The efficiency and traceability of these solutions lend themselves to better support international payments, including favorable currency conversions and automatic tax withholding.
Types of B2B payment automation
As previously mentioned, B2B payment processing is a rather elaborate, multi-stage endeavor, offering plenty of opportunity to automate individual functions or the entire operation from end-to-end. As you explore what’s available on the market, you’ll likely run across solutions that focus on:
- E-invoicing: Create, send, monitor, and receive digital copies of invoices that can be matched against purchase orders to further ensure accuracy
- Back office integration: Seamlessly access, manipulate, and update the customer and payment data of your existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution without any manual intervention
- Batch processing: Handle large volumes of automated clearing house (ACH), electronic fund transfer (EFT), and other transactions in a matter of seconds
- Payment gateways: Readily capture and transmit relevant transaction data from the buyer to the payment processor — the middleman that communicates between the customer’s bank and yours
- International transactions: Support cross-border payments by automating currency conversion and regulatory compliance
- Accounts receivable: Cover all of the above functions and more with a holistic solution that supports the entire invoice-to-cash (I2C) cycle
Common B2B payment automation challenges and how to overcome them
While we’ve outlined the distinct advantages delivered by an automation strategy, we should note that there is always a corresponding tradeoff when you modernize your technology and operations.
How to automate your B2B payments
Step 1: Evaluate your existing business needs, payment processes, and technologies
Before you begin, go through your entire A/R workflow — from invoice creation to final reporting on your general ledger — to gain a thorough understanding of your payment-adjacent activities. Be sure to document any process inefficiencies or bottlenecks you run across, and identify the tasks that consume the most staff time. You should also look for any operational or application interdependencies in your current setup.
Step 2: Explore what’s on the market, noting important features
Check out popular, well-reviewed B2B payment solutions like our Accounts Receivable Automation software. Match up capabilities with the problem areas you’ve already identified. At the same time, consider any future growth plans or operational changes you’ve been planning. Will this platform be able to accommodate those as well? Can it readily integrate with your existing ERP investments? What level of ongoing user support does it come with? Will it work with all of the payment types that your customers prefer?
Step 3: Choose the right solution and deploy it
Once you’ve decided on a platform, put together a deployment schedule for your new software. Ideally, you’ll want the implementation to occur over a weekend or some other period when work is slow and staff are predominantly out of the office. Be sure to leave plenty of time for any data migration or software integration that may need to occur. Ideally, whichever offering you go with will include implementation support. For example, we try to make the rollout of our solution as seamless as possible, providing access to specialized resources, such as video tutorials and a digital onboarding guide with simple, easy-to-follow instructions for initial configuration.
Step 4: Monitor performance metrics to identify opportunities for further improvement
Just because you have your software deployed, it doesn’t mean that you’ve fully optimized or modernized your B2B payment platform. Leverage whatever reporting or monitoring capabilities your new solution provides, reviewing these regularly to identify any ongoing inefficiencies or recurring errors that might be undermining the value of your investment. With our offering, we include a comprehensive summary dashboard as well as a variety of bundled reports that make it easy to capture and review important A/R-related key performance indicators (KPIs).
Key features to look for in a payment automation platform
When you ultimately choose to pursue a B2B automation solution, your situation and requirements will vary depending on the unique needs of your business, industry, and region. However, some common capabilities tend to prove useful in most cases, and we’ve intentionally loaded them into our platform.
At a bare minimum, though, you should pursue a solution that includes:
- Multi-touch dunning: Simply sending an email to follow up on payment requests isn’t enough. Instead, go with a dunning strategy that can reach out across multiple channels (e.g., text, phone, email) simultaneously.
- Broad integration: Choose a solution that not only integrates with your current ERP and back-office systems but that also supports the most common platforms to make future provider changes easier.
- AI-powered cash application: If you deal with particularly complex invoices or have customers who frequently cover multiple sales with a single payment, you should consider leveraging the rationalizing capabilities of AI to make sure that these incoming funds are applied to the right accounts.
- Self-serve tools: Empower customers to control their buying experience without involving your staff by offering them access to customer-facing payment portals or similar capabilities.
- Cross-border payment support: Admittedly, this feature is less universal, but if you engage in any online business, you should opt for a platform that can work with customers from across the globe.
Automate your B2B payments with Invoiced
Whether you choose to update your entire A/R process or just a handful of operations, the right B2B payment automation solution will help you save time, labor, and money. And with our Accounts Receivable Automation software, we can provide you with a new and better way to receive and process payments.
Leverage our Self-Serve Customer Portal to make it easy for buyers to initiate transactions, register disputes, and update the details of their customer profile — all without any support from your staff. Or take advantage of our CashMatch AI to ensure that these incoming funds are quickly and accurately applied to the right accounts, invoices, and balances every time. We’ve even augmented our platform with the global payment capabilities of Flywire software, empowering you to support diverse payment methods in more than 140 currencies across 240 countries and territories.
Schedule a demo today to see how you can get paid faster with less effort!
