Back in March and April, Parascript commissioned research with the Aite Group to better understand the current state of receivables processing automation at mid-market companies ($50m – $500m). Most specifically, we were interested in the more complex, business-to-business (B2B) market.

We learned a great deal. A few of the highlights:

• The average mid-size B2B company employs 7.9 people that deal with receivables processing. These averages were skewed upwards by two industries; healthcare and manufacturing.
• These companies were highly unlikely to utilize lockboxes for receivables processing. This too was most likely a reflection of complexity, but should serve as a signal to innovative lockbox providers that opportunities exist.
• Back-office systems at 69% of these companies do not support automatic matching of electronic remittance and payment data.

One of the challenges with research like this is that while we have been able to identify and quantify many of the barriers to straight-through processing, finding consensus on solutions was much more difficult. This could reflect a limited understanding about what types of technologies are available and how they might be applied.

The bottom line however, is that there appears to be a lot of room for process improvement.

You can get the entire report from Aite with a subscription, or free from Parascript by clicking here.