Why 92% of our enterprise invoices are never paid from email 

Across the $2B+ in receivables we manage at Monk, 92% of enterprise invoices have to be submitted through the customer’s accounts payable portal. They do not get paid from an emailed invoice. Somebody logs into Coupa or Ariba or Fieldglass, finds the right entity, fills in the fields that particular buyer requires, attaches the document in the format that buyer demands, and submits.

That number surprises people who have not sold to large companies. It stops being surprising about a week after they close their first enterprise customer.

An unpaid invoice has seven states

Most AR reporting treats an invoice as paid or unpaid, with an age attached. 

The lifecycle has seven steps. An invoice is created. It is delivered, which for enterprise customers usually means submitted to a portal rather than emailed. It is accepted, or it is rejected. It is matched to a purchase order and a receipt. It is approved. It enters a payment run. It is paid.

An invoice can sit for six weeks at any one of those steps, and the aging report shows the same thing in every case: unpaid, 45 days.

The fix is different at each step, and only the last two have anything to do with collections. Chasing a customer who has not received a valid invoice does not produce payment. It produces a polite reply saying they cannot find it.

Portals fail quietly

Delivery breaks most often and most quietly.

A buyer’s portal adds a required field in a quarterly release and submissions start failing validation, with no notification to the supplier. An invoice is rejected for a purchase order mismatch and the rejection sits in a portal inbox nobody on the finance team checks. A remit-to address changed and the portal is still holding the old one. A supplier record is deactivated after a merger.

From your side none of these look like anything. There is no bounce, no error, no email. The invoice does not progress, and the first signal is that it is old.

Our own data puts edge cases like these at 39% of the slowdown in cash flow. A large share of the money that is late sits in a step most teams do not measure and most software does not touch.

Why it gets called a collections problem

Because collections is where it shows up.

The invoice is old, so it enters the chase queue, so a person emails the customer about it. Sometimes the customer replies explaining the rejection, and someone re-submits, and it gets paid, and nobody records what happened. The cause is never captured. It becomes another late invoice that is eventually cleared.

Do that a few hundred times and you have a DSO number that everyone agrees is too high and a set of proposed fixes that are all about follow-up cadence. More reminders, earlier reminders, a stricter escalation path. Those things do help with the invoices that need chasing. They do nothing at all for an invoice that was never accepted.

Worse, chasing a delivery failure damages the relationship. You are asking a customer to pay something their system never took in. They cannot act on it, and you look like you are not paying attention.

What to measure instead

Three things, and none of them need new software.

First, acceptance rate. Of the invoices you submitted this month, what proportion were accepted by the customer’s system, as distinct from paid. If you cannot answer that, you do not know how much of your AR is in play.

Second, time to accepted. Measure it from issue date to portal acceptance rather than to payment. That is the number that tells you whether your problem is upstream or downstream. If a meaningful share of your DSO accrues before acceptance, no amount of collections work will move it.

Third, rejection reasons, categorised. Most rejections cluster into a handful of causes per buyer, and the same cause repeats. Once you can see that one customer rejects on a purchase order format quirk eleven times a quarter, that is a fixable thing rather than eleven separate incidents.

Where we are

Monk submits invoices into more than 600 corporate accounts payable portals, and 87% of those submissions happen without a person involved. The remaining 13% is the interesting part, and the work there is unglamorous and specific: one buyer’s portal at a time, one validation rule at a time.

On the collections side, Julia, our agent for Intelligent Collections, reads inbound replies and responds to their content rather than advancing a fixed sequence, and 90% of invoices resolve without escalation. Cash application matches 80% of payments automatically, rising to 95% once teams enable suggested rules. Customers see a 40% average reduction in DSO.

We are SOC 2 Type II compliant and integrate with QuickBooks, NetSuite, Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe and Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Where to start

If your DSO is higher than you would like, start by asking what share of your invoices reached an accepted state, and how long that took. Follow-up speed is the second question, and most teams treat it as the first.

For most companies selling into large customers the answer is uncomfortable, and it is also the cheapest thing on the list to fix. It is a process problem rather than a relationship one. Nobody has to be persuaded of anything. The invoice has to get in.

Book a demo to see how Monk can support your portal automation: https://monk.com/book-a-demo