If you have spent any time managing finance operations, you know how easily routine tasks can get out of hand. From issuing hundreds of invoices to keeping track of vendor payments, the manual work piles up. Errors sneak in, payments get delayed, and tracking approvals feel like an endless loop of emails.
Peakflo changes all that.
Designed specifically for finance teams, Peakflo automates your AR and accounts payable AP processes. It takes the repetitive tasks off your plate and gives you more time to focus on what really matters: driving financial strategy. With features like automated invoicing, payment reminders, real-time reporting, and seamless ERP integration, Peakflo helps you stay on top of cash flow without the usual hassle.
In this blog, we will explain how Peakflo simplifies AR and AP workflows and show you the impact automation can have on your finance operations.
Now, let’s examine why these processes matter and how Peakflo tackles its most significant challenges.
Understanding AR and AP
Before discussing how Peakflo simplifies your financial processes, let’s examine the core functions of AR and AP and why they are critical to your business’s financial health.
What is AR?
Accounts receivable represents the money your customers owe you for the goods or services you’ve provided. It sounds simple, but anyone in finance knows how quickly AR can become a headache. Tracking down unpaid invoices, sending reminders, and managing disputes take up valuable time. Late payments affect your cash flow and force you to spend time following up instead of focusing on high-level tasks.
Common AR challenges include:
- Manual invoice creation: Tedious and prone to errors.
- Late or missed payments: Impact your liquidity and financial forecasting.
- Dispute resolution: Time-consuming when there’s no centralized system for communication.
What is Accounts Payable AP?
On the flip side, accounts payable is the money you owe your vendors. Paying invoices on time while managing multiple approval levels can be a complex balancing act. Manual processes slow down approvals, cause missed payments, and make it harder to keep track of budgets.
Common AP challenges include:
- Manual data entry: Increases the risk of human error.
- Approval bottlenecks: Delays payments and disrupts vendor relationships.
- Missed discounts: Due to slow payment processes.
When your AR and AP processes rely on manual work, your business is more vulnerable to delays, errors, and financial strain. Peakflo simplifies both AR and AP, making your processes faster, more accurate, and easier to manage.
Next, we’ll explore how Peakflo tackles the challenges of AR head-on.
How Peakflo Simplifies AR Processes
Managing accounts receivable is often the most time-consuming part of finance operations. You track payments, manage disputes, and send reminders, all of which can overwhelm your team. Peakflo streamlines these tasks, reducing manual work and giving you more control over your cash flow.
Here’s how Peakflo makes your AR process smoother:
1. Automated Invoice Creation and Delivery
With Peakflo, creating and sending invoices is no longer a repetitive task. Whether you need to issue professional e-invoices, recurring invoices, or pro forma invoices, Peakflo automates it all. You can customize invoices with branding, tax rates, and line items and even add digital signatures, resulting in fewer errors.
Key benefits:
- Issue invoices in seconds.
- Automate recurring invoices for ongoing contracts.
- Ensure accuracy with customized templates and digital signatures.
2. Automated Payment Reminders
Chasing overdue payments can drain your time and energy. Peakflo takes care of this by automating payment reminders. You can set up workflows that send reminders based on your customer’s payment history, segment, or behavior. These reminders can be sent through email, SMS, WhatsApp, and even local messaging platforms like LINE and Zalo. You can also flag overdue invoices for escalation, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Key benefits:
- Never miss a payment follow-up.
- Customize reminders based on customer type and payment behavior.
- Use multi-channel reminders for higher engagement.
3. Customer Portal for Self-Service
Peakflo offers a self-serve customer portal that makes life easier for both you and your customers. Instead of going back and forth over email or phone, your customers can log into the portal to view their invoices, check balances, make payments, or resolve disputes. This improves customer satisfaction and reduces the load on your finance team.
Key benefits:
- Customers can track and pay invoices at their convenience.
- Centralized dispute management reduces back-and-forth communication.
- Improve cash flow by making it easier for customers to pay you.
4. Automated Cash Application
Matching payments to invoices can be tedious, especially when customers make partial payments, or payments do not align perfectly with invoice amounts. Peakflo’s AI-powered cash application automatically matches payments to the correct invoices, reducing the need for manual intervention. It can even handle partial payments and automate the import of bank feeds.
Key benefits:
- Automate the payment matching process.
- Reduce errors in cash application.
- Handle partial payments with ease.
5. Real-Time Reporting and Analytics
The ability to see where your AR stands at any moment is critical to managing cash flow. Peakflo provides real-time reporting on crucial AR metrics such as days sales outstanding (DSO), total overdue amounts, and aging balances. This data helps you make informed decisions and adjust your strategy before cash flow problems arise.
Key benefits:
- Monitor collections in real time.
- Access insights to predict cash flow trends.
- Track aging balances and overdue payments.
6. Finance CRM for AR
Managing relationships with customers becomes more streamlined with Peakflo’s finance CRM. It allows you to track communication, assign tasks, and manage follow-ups all in one place. This way, your finance and sales teams stay aligned, and nothing slips through the cracks.
Key benefits:
- Track customer interactions and follow-ups.
- Assign tasks based on roles for better collaboration.
- Align sales and finance teams for smoother collections.
Peakflo completely transforms AR processes. By taking the manual work out of invoicing, payment tracking, and customer communication, your team can focus on higher-value tasks. In the next section, we will explore how Peakflo makes the same impact on accounts payable.
How Peakflo Simplifies AP Processes
Managing AP is a balancing act. You need to stay on top of incoming invoices, ensure timely approvals, and maintain strong relationships with vendors—all while managing your budget and avoiding costly errors. Peakflo automates these critical tasks, helping you avoid bottlenecks, improve accuracy, and maintain healthy cash flow.
Here’s how Peakflo simplifies your AP processes:
1. Automated Data Entry
Manual data entry is one of the biggest time-wasters in AP. Peakflo’s AI-powered Optical Character Recognition (OCR) automates the process of capturing vendor invoice details, whether they come via email, WhatsApp, or API. The system supports multiple languages and custom fields, allowing you to process invoices without lifting a finger.
Key benefits:
- Automate the capture of invoice details.
- Reduce human error in data entry.
- Process invoices in 41 different languages.
2. Automated Approval Workflows
Chasing down approvals from department heads or managers can delay payments and strain vendor relationships. Peakflo automates the entire approval process for purchase requests, orders, bills, and credit notes. You can set unlimited approval levels and define rules for different types of purchases, ensuring that every approval follows your company’s policies without manual intervention.
Key benefits:
- Automate complex approval workflows with ease.
- Set rules for different types of purchases.
- Speed up the approval process to prevent delays.
3. Automated 2-Way and 3-Way Matching
Matching vendor invoices to purchase orders (2-way matching) or to both purchase orders and goods receipts (3-way matching) is essential to avoid overpayments or fraud. Peakflo automates this matching process, ensuring that your business only pays for goods or services it has actually received speeding up auditing and ensuring accurate payments.
Key benefits:
- Prevent overpayments or paying for incomplete deliveries.
- Automate 2-way and 3-way matching to improve accuracy.
- Speed up the payment cycle by automating checks.
4. Automated Payments
Processing vendor payments manually can be a logistical nightmare, especially when dealing with multiple currencies. Peakflo’s automated payments feature allows you to schedule and make payments in bulk. It even handles payment receipts and alerts you if there’s a low balance in your payables wallet, reducing the chances of failed payments.
Key benefits:
- Automate bulk payments to vendors.
- Handle multi-currency payments with ease.
- Receive alerts for low wallet balances to avoid payment failures.
5. Budget Management
Staying on top of your budget is essential when managing AP. Peakflo allows you to track your budgets in real time, assign bills and payments to specific budgets, and monitor spend summaries. This reduces the need for manual updates and ensures that every bill and payment is accounted for within your company’s budget limits.
Key benefits:
- Track budgets in real time.
- Automatically assign bills and payments to budgets.
- Monitor spend summaries without manual updates.
6. Vendor Onboarding and Portal
Vendor management can be a headache if you are still relying on email exchanges for updates and payments. Peakflo’s secure, self-serve vendor portal allows your vendors to check purchase orders, issue invoices, and track payment status—all without contacting your procurement team. The platform also streamlines vendor onboarding so you can manage their information, bank details, and communication from one place.
Key benefits:
- Streamline vendor onboarding with self-serve management.
- Vendors can track payments and submit invoices through the portal.
- Centralize vendor communication to reduce errors and delays.
By automating your AP workflows, Peakflo ensures that your vendors get paid on time and that your finance team is no longer tied up with tedious manual tasks. Next, we will examine some real-world examples to see how businesses have transformed their AR and AP processes with Peakflo.
Real-World Case Studies
Seeing automation in action can help you understand its actual impact on businesses. Let’s examine how companies have transformed their AR and AP processes with Peakflo.
Ninja Van
Ninja Van, a leading logistics company in Southeast Asia, handles over 10,000 invoices each month, all with varying customer requirements. Before using Peakflo, the process of manually preparing invoices and chasing down payments was draining resources. Dispute resolution was another time-consuming challenge, leading to delays in collections.
What changed with Peakflo?
- With Peakflo integrated into their existing NetSuite ERP, Ninja Van now uses automated invoicing to streamline the preparation of custom invoices. Specific field mapping tailored the invoices to meet their customers’ needs without the manual effort.
- Peakflo’s customer portal has become a one-stop solution for centralized communication and dispute management. This means customers can resolve issues and provide payment proofs directly through the portal, reducing the back-and-forth with Ninja Van’s finance team.
Result: By automating AR tasks, Ninja Van significantly reduced manual workload and improved cash flow, ensuring faster payments and fewer disputes.
Hai Sia
Hai Sia, a seafood supply company, was previously handling its reimbursements and bills manually, requiring each department to submit them via email or physical documents. Tracking approvals across different departments could have been more convenient, leading to delays in payments and disorganization.
What changed with Peakflo?
- Hai Sia introduced WhatsApp OCR for bill entry. Now, team members can simply snap a picture of the bill and send it via WhatsApp. Peakflo’s OCR technology automatically captures and processes the bill data.
- The entire team can now track approvals and payments in one place. Automated approval workflows ensure bills are cleared quickly and vendor communication happens seamlessly through Peakflo’s platform.
Result: Hai Sia reduced the administrative burden of managing paper invoices and approvals, speeding up their AP process and improving relationships with vendors through timely payments.
Both case studies highlight the tangible benefits of Peakflo’s automation solutions. By reducing manual tasks, improving accuracy, and centralizing communications, businesses can focus on more strategic finance initiatives while improving both AR and AP processes.
In the final section, let’s recap the key benefits of automating AR and AP with Peakflo.
The Benefits of Automating AR and AP with Peakflo
By now, it’s clear that Peakflo offers convenience while bringing measurable improvements to your financial operations. When you automate your AR and AP processes, the benefits go far beyond saving time. Let’s recap the core advantages of using Peakflo.
1. Time Savings
Automation reduces the manual work involved in AR and AP. Your team no longer needs to spend hours issuing invoices, chasing payments, or tracking down approvals. With Peakflo handling these tasks automatically, your finance team can focus on more strategic work, like forecasting and financial planning.
2. Reduced Errors
Manual data entry and invoice processing are prone to mistakes, which can lead to late payments, disputes, or even financial loss. Peakflo reduces human error by automating data entry, payment matching, and approval workflows. This means fewer mistakes and smoother financial operations overall.
3. Improved Cash Flow
Late payments can severely impact your cash flow. With Peakflo’s automated payment reminders and customer portal, you can ensure that invoices are paid on time. Additionally, real-time reporting helps you stay on top of cash flow trends, enabling you to make better financial decisions.
4. Better Vendor Relationships
On the AP side, paying vendors on time is critical to maintaining good relationships. By automating approvals and payments, Peakflo ensures your vendors are paid promptly, helping you avoid disputes and take advantage of early payment discounts.
5. Streamlined Communication
Peakflo centralizes all customer and vendor communication, reducing the need for email exchanges. The customer and vendor portals provide a self-serve environment where users can track invoices, payments, and disputes in real time. This improves transparency and reduces the workload for your finance team.
6. Enhanced Financial Visibility
With real-time reporting and analytics, you have complete visibility into your AR and AP processes. Peakflo provides insights on overdue invoices, cash flow trends, and outstanding payments, allowing you to adjust your financial strategy as needed.
Conclusion
Automating your AR and AP processes with Peakflo improves efficiency and enhances your overall financial health. By freeing up your team from manual tasks, reducing errors, and improving cash flow, Peakflo allows you to focus on what matters most—growing your business.
If you’re ready to streamline your finance operations and simplify AR and AP, consider Peakflo.
