This week’s blog is from one of our exhibitors, Paraglide:
For a long time, accounts receivable sat in that part of finance everybody knew was important, but few people saw as especially strategic. It was the function that made sure invoices went out, payments came in, overdue accounts were followed up on, and cash was reconciled properly. Everyone understood that it mattered, because without it, revenue does not turn into cash, but it was still often viewed as a process-heavy, back-office discipline rather than a serious driver of operational performance. That view is now changing as businesses face more pressure on cash flow, efficiency and forecasting. The fundamentals have not changed, but the weaknesses in the process are more visible when cash collection slips or disputes build up.
Why finance operations still feels more manual than it looks
One of the more frustrating realities in finance operations is that the function often looks more automated from the outside than it feels from the inside. Most companies already have systems in place for the most parts of the process. Invoices are raised through the ERP, payments are recorded, workflows are routed through software, and reports are available at the click of a button. If you look at the process from a distance, it can seem as though the operational side has already been modernised.
The problem is that a lot of the real work in finance does not sit neatly inside those structured steps. It sits in the follow-up, the clarification, the chasing, the internal handoffs and the endless small exceptions that stop a straightforward payment from being straightforward. Someone still has to deal with the customer who says they never received the invoice, the account that cannot pay because the PO is missing, the billing query that needs input from another team, or the payment promise that sounds reassuring but never quite turns into cash.
That is where finance operations has quietly carried a lot of the burden for years. The transaction layer became more systemised, but the coordination layer often stayed manual. So while the process looked more digital on paper, the day-to-day experience for the team did not always become much lighter. In many businesses, people were still doing the work of stitching systems, conversations and internal teams together so that money could actually come in.
Where traditional AR automation helped, and where it stopped
The first generation of AR automation did solve real problems. It made collections more consistent, reduced some of the admin and gave teams much better visibility into overdue balances and ageing. That mattered, especially for finance teams that had been relying on spreadsheets, shared inboxes and individual habits to keep track of what was outstanding.
But most of those tools were built to make the process easier to manage, not to take on the work itself. They were good at standard steps and repeatable actions. They could send reminders on schedule, trigger workflows, organise queues and surface information more clearly. What they could not really do was deal with the messy, ongoing communication that sits between an invoice being issued and a payment actually arriving.
And that messy part is usually where the real effort lives. A customer asks for a copy invoice. Another says they cannot pay until a query is resolved. Someone promises payment next Thursday and then goes quiet. A dispute sits in limbo because finance needs sales to confirm something, and sales has not come back yet. None of this is unusual. In many receivables teams, this is the work. It is also the reason so many finance operations teams still felt stretched, even after automation had supposedly improved the process.
AI agents and the next stage of accounts receivable automation
AI agents are starting to matter in a way earlier automation tools did not, as they are better suited to the part of receivables work that has always been harder to standardise. Traditional automation works best when workflows are straightforward and predictable (If that date arrives, send this reminder). AI agents can operate more flexibly than that. They can read an incoming message, understand what the customer is asking, pull the right information from connected systems and take the next step based on the context. That might mean sending an invoice copy, logging a payment commitment, continuing a follow-up sequence or recognising that a case needs human attention because it is no longer a simple collections issue.
This matters because so much of receivables work happens through communication. It happens in inboxes, in replies, in small back-and-forth moments that are easy to underestimate until you see how much team time they consume.
What this means for finance operations
Historically, a lot of value in AR came from persistence and manual control. Teams kept the process moving by staying on top of every follow-up, every query, every overdue balance and every exception. As more of the routine accounts receivable communication and follow-up work becomes automated, finance operations has more space to focus on the areas where human judgement makes the biggest difference. That includes spotting payment risk earlier, seeing patterns across disputes, fixing broken internal handoffs, refining how different customer groups are managed and stepping in where a situation needs commercial awareness rather than another reminder email.
That is a meaningful shift, because it moves the function away from pure task execution and closer to process ownership. Instead of spending all day pushing work through manually, the team can spend more time improving how the receivables process performs overall. In stronger organisations, that makes finance operations more visible, not less. The team becomes more involved in the quality of cash conversion, not just the mechanics of collections.
The future of finance operations and AR automation
The future of finance operations is likely to be more analytical, more cross-functional and more commercially aware than the past. Teams will still care about overdue debt and collections activity, of course, but they will also be expected to understand what is driving delay, where the process is breaking down and how to improve cash outcomes without damaging the customer relationship.
That is why accounts receivable automation matters beyond productivity alone. At its best, it does not just make the team faster. It changes what the team has time to do, what it can see more clearly and where it can have more impact. And that is really the bigger story here. Automation is not removing the need for finance operations. It is pushing the function towards work that is more valuable, more visible and, frankly, more in line with how important cash performance has always been.
Rasmus Areskoug, founder of Paraglide, held a 5 in Twenty session at financeSHOWCASE in Twickenham: ‘How AI agents are transforming finance teams in 2026’.
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