Executive summary

From manager level to CFOs – finance teams know that their processes around accounts receivable are costing them too much time and money, act as a blocker for international expansion and even hold back profitability. If they could figure out a better way, 92% said they could actually increase their earnings per share. Yet despite increased spending over the last year on technology and people, their challenges have largely remained unchanged or even increased. That’s what we found in our second global survey of more than 300 finance professionals. This year we were also able to break out sentiment by title and experience level, and found it influences the way finance professionals perceive A/R challenges and opportunities. We surveyed US businesses across industries with between $100 million and $1 billion in annual revenue, as well as companies that are doing business globally and planning global operations in the near future.

Across the board, those surveyed are well aware that bottlenecks in A/R and payments processes soak up time and sap energy that could be better spent on executing the company’s strategy. But they haven’t found a great solution to the still many manual and disconnected parts of the payments and A/R process – yet. That’s despite more than half of our respondents running their accounting and finance processes on SAP, Oracle or Microsoft Dynamics, and another ⅓ on NetSuite. Respondents say they lose money because of time spent dealing with A/R. They also identified persistent payments challenges – many of which remain unchanged or increased from last year’s survey, including struggling with FX rates and cross-border payments. Many of these same respondents are also spending more on finance technology, but bumping up against issues. Almost 9/10 of those surveyed say spending has increased over the past two years – with half increasing between 5% and 10%, and 40% increasing spending between 11% to 20%.

The long and short of it is that, so far, finance pros have yet to check a lot of the boxes on their A/R wish lists – speed, security, low fees and rates, ease-of-use, and payment choice for their B2B customers.

Each key finding highlights some of the major takeaways from this survey when it comes to the A/R process itself, the challenges cross-border payments introduce to global expansion, and what’s on the minds of finance professionals for 2022.