The Ultimate Guide to B2B Payment Automation
Blaine Sanderson 
August 20th, 2025
Let’s face it, handling B2B payments can be tedious. Manually tracking down invoices, gathering approvals, and processing payments一all while attempting to avoid late fees一is enough to stress out even an experienced AP leader.
But payment processing doesn’t have to be so challenging. With the right software and new tools driven by artificial intelligence, automating B2B payments is easy. Automation cuts down on manual labor, prevents human error, and protects against fraud. Ultimately, automating B2B payments can save companies money, while positively impacting the AP team’s morale and productivity.
In this piece, we’ll delve into B2B payments automation by exploring different forms of B2B payments and digging into the ways AI and machine learning are changing payments. We’ll also detail some concrete benefits to implementing it in your AP organization. Finally, we’ll look at ways automating payments can prevent fraud and keep your operations in tune with modern best practices.
Table of Contents
- What Is B2B Payment Automation?
- How Does B2B Payment Automation Work?
- Core B2B Payment Automation Functionality
- What Payment Processes Can Be Optimized with Automation?
- What Types of Payments Does B2B Payment Automation Bring Together?
- What Are the Benefits of B2B Payment Automation?
- Customer Story – How Payment Automation Enabled a Global IT Company to Scale Operations
- The Cost of Not Automating Payments
- Revolutionize Your B2B Payments with MHC NorthStar Automation
Key Takeaways
- Automating B2B payments increases speed, efficiency, and accuracy by as much as 70%. That cuts processing time massively, enabling your business to boost cash flow and avoid late payment fees.
- An automated B2B payment system makes it far easier to take advantage of rebates offered by vendors and discounts for early payments.
- A secure, automated B2B payment solution provides multi-factor verification, continuous monitoring, and other reliable security measures. That both prevents multiple forms of payment fraud and makes it easier to detect and address any fraudulent activity that does occur.
- Eliminating manual processes that are prone to human errors greatly boosts the speed and accuracy of your payments. With deeper visibility into every stage of your process, tracking invoices and identifying bottlenecks becomes much simpler.
What Is B2B Payment Automation?
B2B payment automation is a technical process that enables organizations to send payments to other companies electronically in exchange for providing goods or services. Unlike manual processing, automated B2B payments software organizes invoices as they come in, routes payments for approval, and completes payment transactions on time without requiring a new setup for different vendors, all without human interference.
Payment automation platforms reduce the chances of paying duplicate invoices, sending payments without authorization, and missing payment deadlines — in fact, it also boosts your chances of qualifying for vendor rebates for early payment. Eliminating those risks makes it much easier to identify and prevent fraud, keeping your business compliant with all applicable regulations.
How Does B2B Payment Automation Work?
B2B payment automation involves replacing processes that have previously been handled manually or with minimal digital assistance with automated, touchless processes. That might include everything from entering invoice data to routing payments for approval to issuing payments in a variety of forms. The ultimate goal of automating B2B payments is to reduce delays, eliminate avoidable errors, and create smooth, mutually beneficial working relationships between businesses.
Core B2B Payment Automation Functionality
Recent studies show that a third of businesses have seen a noticeable increase in late payments over the past year. That’s a frustrating situation both for organizations that are left waiting for payments and for the businesses that struggle to make payments on time. In 2025, around 80% of finance teams still fall short of a highly automated workflow. The increase in speed and volume that comes with automation can yield big benefits, especially in four key areas of invoice processing.
Electronic Payments
By configuring electronic payment transactions to match your specific B2B payment requirements, automation takes expensive custom interfaces and third-party consultants off the table. That makes it easier to reduce costs as you make your digital transformation.
Financial Transactions
A system that automates the use of wire transfers, virtual cards, and other regular financial transactions makes it simpler to match interfaces with your B2B partners. That allows you to keep a standard enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and combine payments for even bigger savings.
Document Printing & Distribution Services
Automating the printing and distribution of documents is a huge time-saver for any business dealing with high volumes of invoices, tax documents, and other negotiable documents. Remote access to printers ensures that you can produce high quality checks from any location.
Automated Document Distribution
An automated B2B payment system makes it simple to deliver invoices, remittance advices, and other documents to payees via multiple channels, including self-service portals and email. That cuts back on time and effort that might otherwise be spent responding to inquiries.
Rebates & Advanced Security
An automated solution easily facilitates Premium ACH and virtual card payments. That helps your business qualify for valuable rebates. Automating these payments also boosts protection with advanced security features such as multi-factor verification, continuous monitoring, and OFAC screening.
Find out how B2B payment rebate programs work and the businesses benefits they facilitate >
Secure Remote Print
Using an automated remote print solution allows your organization to print sensitive documents such as accounts payable checks securely from any location. With security measures including document and data encryption, user authentication, and secure releases, it’s the safest way to manage physical document production.
What Payment Processes Can Be Optimized with Automation?
Automating B2B payments has a holistic impact on your operations, affecting a wide range of your day-to-day functions. That said, the impacts of automation will be most noticeable as they apply to some specific payment processes. Let’s take a closer look at some of the areas that are most directly improved with a B2B automation solution.
“Simply put, automation is the key to an agile and scalable AP operation. As technology advances, finance leadership will further understand the importance of investing in a solution that allows their AP team to go from transactional to strategic.”
1. Data Entry
Eliminating manual data entry is one of the most visible and valuable benefits of moving to an automated system. Manual data entry takes a lot of time — more than half of AP teams spend at least 10 hours a week on invoice processing — and lends itself to human errors that can be difficult and costly to correct. That kind of tedious and repetitive work can lead to employee burnout.
Automating data entry alleviates much of the manual tasks that make up 53% of the average AP employee’s workday while also eliminating human error and increasing processing speeds.
2. Document Matching
Making sure that data matches across all necessary documents is a huge part of processing payments, and also one that becomes much more tedious and time-consuming when performed manually.
An automated system with three-way matching can automatically compare invoices against purchase orders and receipts of goods and services, drastically reducing the amount of time it takes to complete a B2B transaction.
3. Internal Workflows
Without an automated system, the workflows for making B2B payments are often fragmented and spread across multiple departments. That increases the risk of errors and slows down the approval process.
Automation allows your AP team to consolidate those processes and bring them under the same umbrella, resulting in a faster, more streamlined payment process with deeper visibility.
4. Payment Processing
Only about 25% of international payments follow straight-through processing, with no human touch points. That means that a large percentage of businesses are leaving money and time on the table, bogging down their processing with time-wasting manual tasks and inefficiencies.
By allowing payments to be made via a dedicated website portal or an e-invoicing platform, your business can build valuable trust with B2B partners.
5. Fraud Prevention
Some business leaders stick to outdated processes because they mistakenly think they’re more secure. In fact, 65% of organizations that rely on paper checks fall victim to check fraud.
While a B2B check payment automation solution can’t completely eliminate all forms of fraud, it can reduce them sharply with multi-factor verification, automatic compliance screening, and other advanced security tools. That makes it far simpler to identify intentional overpayments, fraudulent invoices, attempts at data theft and other common forms of payment fraud.
6. Duplicate Payment Identification
Duplicate payments occur when a business issues a payment to a partner or vendor that has already been paid for that transaction. Duplicate payments account for an estimated one percent of total payments even amongst top-performing businesses, a significant amount for organizations that process a high volume of B2B transactions. Not only are those errors costly to correct, they can also put strain on valuable B2B relationships.
An automated payment system is able to flag transactions that have already been paid before a duplicate payment is issued, removing human error from the equation.
Learn how to prevent duplicate payments from Mary Schaeffer >
7. Reporting and Audits
Keeping careful records of your B2B transactions is essential for business reporting purposes, and for resolving any financial disputes or issues that might arise.
An automated payment system generates detailed, easily searchable reports on every transaction your business conducts, providing useful material for internal and external audits. Teams using fully automated AP processes report that they can track cash flow across their entire operation much more easily than less automated organizations.
8. Timely Payments, Discounts, and Rebates
Many vendors offer discounts for early payments, while many also charge fees and penalties for late payments. The former is obviously preferable, but studies show that only about a third of businesses take advantage of early payment discounts. In many cases, that is because slow approvals, inefficient practices, and human error make it difficult to process payments quickly.
The good news is that premium ACH or virtual card transactions processed through a fully automated AP system can earn organizations instant rebates with no additional effort.
Discover how to generate revenue through rebate opportunities >
9. Payment Process Visibility
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for businesses that rely largely on manual processes is a lack of real-time visibility into transaction statuses. When issues with payment processing arise, being unable to easily check where an invoice is within your system can compound the problem.
An automated B2B payment system provides at-a-glance visibility into every step of your process, making it much easier to track documents and identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Find out more about the advantages that come with enhanced visibility into the payment process >
10. Error Prevention and Reduction
More human touch points in payment processing means more human errors. By automating B2B payments, a business can drastically reduce the risk of errors that slow down payments and create costly delays across the system. Studies show that correcting a single invoice error usually takes businesses two to six days. That adds up to some considerable time and money.
Automated systems with optical character recognition (OCR) tools eliminate much of that risk by instantly extracting data from any source and routing documents automatically, with no human touch points required.
What Types of Payments Does B2B Payment Automation Bring Together?
One of the most appealing benefits of automated B2B payments is the ability to integrate a wide range of payment types into a single, comprehensive payment system. This not only increases your payment processing power, it is also much easier to manage than maintaining separate processes for each type of payment. Some common payment methods that can be consolidated with B2B automation include:
Checks
ACH (automated clearing houses)
Wire transfers
Single use accounts
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What Are the Benefits of B2B Payment Automation?
It’s easy to see how payment automation cuts down on manual labor, but it offers even more tangible benefits. Let’s take a deeper dive into 11 of the biggest benefits of automated B2B payments.
“Cutting costs while driving greater value is a powerful combination. MHC delivers a secure, intuitive way to simplify AP processes while also taking advantage of rebates and discounts for early payments. It’s a simple way for businesses to do more with less.”
1. Cost Savings
Simply put, electronic payments are cheaper than paper checks. According to a 2019 report by Levvel Research, companies that employed highly automated accounts payable processes spent, on average, only $2.36 per invoice. Companies that relied on minimal automation, on the other hand, spent $15 per invoice一over six times more than their counterparts.
One of the reasons why manual payments are so expensive is that mailing checks require printing supplies, stamps, paper, and, of course, employee labor. With the increased visibility of electronic payments, it is far less likely for payments to fall through the cracks, which ensures companies don’t incur late fees.
2. Faster Payment Processing
When B2B payments are executed manually, invoices can sit on desks or wait in email inboxes for approval for days, if not weeks. Payment automation cuts through those delays by standardizing the approval process. With automation tools, AP departments can dictate who approves which invoices by when and sends reminders or error messages when those rules aren’t followed.
The best B2B payment automation platforms come with customizable dashboards that give a high-level, real-time overview of invoice processing, offering AP leaders instant insight into any outstanding invoices. Optimizing processes with an automated solution makes ERP administration easier, offers deep visibility into payments, and can immediately reduce invoice processing time by 50% or more.
3. Early-Payment Discounts and Rebates
According to PayStream Advisors’ Payables Insight Report, 31% of respondents said manual routing of invoices for payment and approval stood in the way of an early-payment discount. Payment automation shortens the processing cycle, empowering organizations to take advantage of available discounts and save money. Over time, early payment discounts contribute to better cash flow, giving the company more working capital to achieve its goals.
Rebates are another big financial benefit of upgrading to automated B2B payment software. Transactions made with ACH or virtual cards help your business take advantage of rebates from suppliers without putting in any extra effort. MHC NorthStar Payments Plus also connects you to a network of more than 600,000 suppliers, enabling you to earn even more rebates as you make new connections.
4. More Control Over Payments
Speed and accuracy are crucial factors in payments, and an automated B2B payment automation and reconciliation system gives a big boost to both. An automated payment processing system gives your team better control over the timing of payments, allowing your business to take advantage of discounts for early payments.
Automation also eliminates time-consuming human errors that can cause expensive delays in payment. That improved accuracy, combined with a more efficient workflow, ensures that your organization can deliver timely, accurate payments to all of your valued suppliers.
5. Better Orchestrated Workflows
Inefficient workflows are a major factor in delayed payments. Many businesses have too many siloed and segregated processes to maintain a consistent and efficient payment system. That leads to miscommunications, duplicate payments, and other complications that can have a negative impact on vendor relations.
When you automate B2B payments using a centralized dashboard, your organization can more easily manage the execution, approvals process, and tracking of payments. A unified platform eliminates the need to route your workflow through multiple portals, decreasing confusion and boosting efficiency across your business.
6. Increased Productivity
B2B payment automation eliminates manual steps. Not only does this help AP team members operate more efficiently, it also gives them the time and energy to focus on more strategic activities that can scale the business. In addition, modern B2B payment automation software is built on the cloud, giving AP teams the flexibility to work together or individually in a secure environment, regardless of their location or device.
7. Fraud Prevention
Manually tracking check payments is tricky and tedious. When you’re processing checks by hand, it’s easy to miss red flags. This is particularly troublesome when you consider that checks are the payment method most frequently targeted by those committing or attempting to commit fraud.
Falling victim to fraud can be a financial nightmare for your company, but B2B payment automation mitigates the chances of fraud by:
- Flagging invalid invoices
- Enforcing payment reconciliation systems
- Controlling which users are authorized to do specific functions
- Providing visibility into total transactions
- Catching missing or incorrect data
MHC NorthStar Payments Plus goes the extra mile for fraud prevention, offering multi-layered security including multifactor authentication, screening out impersonators and account takeover attempts, and verifying more than 300 data points per supplier.
8. Stronger Vendor Relationships
Having an all-star reputation for paying bills on time sets you apart from other companies and deepens your relationships with suppliers. Developing strong vendor relationships is crucial to your business functioning properly. B2B payment automation fortifies already solid vendor relationships in several ways, including:
- Faster service – Automating payments reduces the amount of time that suppliers and AP team members respond to inquiries around invoice and payment status.
- Real-time visibility – B2B payment platforms come with an ACH portal to provide suppliers with real-time visibility into their transaction statuses.
- Shortened payment cycles – With B2B payment automation, suppliers get paid faster, decreasing key KPIs like Days Sales Outstanding (DSO).
- Correct payments – Mistakes happen, but far less often with automated payments.
- On-time payments – B2B payment solutions send payments on or before their deadlines automatically.
- Avoiding penalties – Nothing damages a buyer-seller relationship like incurring late fees, but with B2B payment automation, you can maintain a positive working relationship.
9. Error Reduction
As you already know, manual data entry is far from a perfect process, and even the smallest errors can take valuable time away from pressing projects, damage customer and supplier relationships, and result in duplicate payments, overpayments, or underpayments. B2B payment automation highlights minor issues before they turn into major problems. With the proper software, mistakes will be few and far between.
10. Enhanced Insights
B2B payment automation software inherently captures financial data, which is critical for performing advanced analytics. Analyzing AP operations can reveal areas for process improvement and inspire ideas for reducing the payment cycle.
For example, B2B payment platforms clearly show which stages of the cycle take the longest, locate approval bottlenecks, and who to contact when there are delays. Moreover, financial data can be imported and exported with real-time access, which gives AP teams the information they need to complete quarterly reports on time. Enhanced insights and increased visibility can open the door to integrating other strategic tools that optimize cash flow, like ERPs or human capital management platforms.
How Payment Automation Enabled a Global IT Company to Scale Operations
To get a better idea of just how impactful automated payment solutions can be to business operations, let’s take a look at a story from an MHC customer who revitalized their payment process.
Our IT and business consulting services client employs around 95,000 professionals in 400 offices across 40 countries.
Their outdated payment solution was no longer able to keep up with the volume of documents they handled, so they came to MHC seeking an automated upgrade.
The Challenges
- Processes for generating and adjusting SWIFT forms, regulatory reports, and other key documents were inefficient and time-consuming.
- A number of key document generation tasks relied on error-prone manual intervention.
- As business grew and demand for documents increased, existing processes lacked the flexibility to scale accordingly.
The Solutions
- Automated software enabled the business to quickly generate documents that can be easily customized and personalized to meet the needs of specific customers – a feature that’s especially valued by the Millennial and Gen Z customers who make up 71% of B2B buyers.
- Automatic tools such as optical character recognition (OCR) pulled data instantly from any source, eliminating manual processes that increase the risk of errors and noncompliance.
- An automated system with a centralized dashboard allowed the business to scale document generation to meet changing volume and demand.
The Results
- The business cut document production time by 90%, generating previously time-consuming SWIFT forms in just seconds.
- Revising document templates became 67% more efficient, making it easy to adapt to changing regulations and customer needs.
- MHC’s customization and automation capabilities made it simple for the business to make complex customizations while seamlessly expanding production.
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The Cost of Not Automating Payments
Investing in automated solutions for managing B2B payments is more crucial than ever in an era of digital transactions. As more and more industries embrace automated payments, organizations that continue to rely on outdated methods and manual processes virtually guarantee that they will be left behind. A business that fails to adopt payment automation runs the risk of:
“Businesses know there are all kinds of threats out there, but they don’t always know what can be done to prevent them. Avoiding and preventing fraud is a key day-to-day challenge for most organizations. The peace of mind our customers get when they entrust more of their fraud prevention efforts to MHC is one of our biggest points of pride.”
Increased Operating Costs
Some businesses are resistant to upgrading to automated payment processing because they worry about the initial cost of investment. In fact, surveys show that more than 75% of executives whose businesses have moved to AP automation say that they’ve seen reduced costs overall. Simply put, processing payments manually takes more time, creates more errors, and costs more money than a reliable, automated system.
Inefficient Processes
As we noted earlier in this article, the list of payment processes that are impacted by transitioning to automation is long and comprehensive. Not only is managing tasks such as data entry and document matching using manual processes slower and more error-prone, those processes tend to be repetitive and tedious for employees. That can lead to higher rates of burnout, a major concern for any business in an era of widespread worker shortages. Automation frees up those workers to focus on more engaging tasks that make better use of their skills and training.
Compliance Violations
Financial transactions between businesses come with a large number of compliance considerations, both due to governmental regulations and industry-specific standards. Making sure that each B2B payment meets every compliance requirement is simply too large a task to be handled manually, especially for a business dealing with high volumes of transactions. AP automation has been shown to reduce the time employees spend correcting errors by more than half, greatly reducing the risk of fines and reputational damage that comes with noncompliance.
Missed Opportunities for Discounts and Rebates
Rebates and early-payment discounts create fantastic opportunities for businesses and their suppliers. Studies have found that a positive discounting experience can strengthen supplier relationships by 40%, making a strong case for taking advantage of those options. The slowdowns and bottlenecks that come with manual and outdated B2B payment processes make it much more difficult to receive rebates and discounts. Automated software solutions with Premium ACH and virtual card payments allow an organization to capture all of the bonuses available to them.
Exposure to Fraud
Recent studies find that around 72% of American businesses have seen an increase in fraud over the past year, and 75% of those organizations have suffered financial losses as a result. Those kinds of numbers can add up to major damage to both your bottom line and your customer relationships. Trying to manage a high volume of invoices using outdated tools or manual processes only makes those cases of fraud harder to detect. AP automation solutions make it far easier to not only identify fraudulent invoices, but also to quickly mitigate the damage they cause and adjust processes to avoid future issues. With 77% of AP professionals saying they know or have been a recent fraud victim, it’s evident that stronger anti-fraud measures are a must in every industry.
Stressed Relationships
A B2B payment relationship depends on both sides maintaining a strong and trusting partnership. If one partner consistently provides the other with late, incomplete, or error-filled documentation, those all-important relationships quickly grow strained and may collapse all together. Automation increases your reliability and lets your partners know that your business can be depended upon to do things the right way every time.
Revolutionize Your B2B Payments with MHC NorthStar Automation
B2B payment automation has countless benefits一from capitalizing on cost-savings, to curtailing fraud, to cashing in on early-payment discounts. And that doesn’t include the satisfaction AP teams feel after switching to a B2B payment automation platform.
AP team members will no longer waste time sifting through invoices or waiting for days to get proper approvals. They’ll also be less worried about making mistakes and have a faster, more accurate quarter-end close. But to reap all the benefits of a B2B payment automation partner, you have to pick the right one.
MHC NorthStar Payments Plus (with Paymode® embedded) is designed to transform AP from a cost center to a profit center. By directing your suppliers’ premium ACH and virtual card payments through a secure embedded business payments network, Payments Plus captures all available rebate opportunities. That generates revenue for your business with no added effort.
MHC NorthStar offers the flexibility of configurable workflows and ease of self-service access. It frees you up from the tedious, everyday tasks and allows you and your team to focus on more value-added work that moves the needle for your business.
Leverage MHC’s proven technology to eliminate the need for manual intervention, streamlining your entire process, while improving efficiencies throughout your team and, ultimately, your entire organization.
Schedule a personalized demo today and see how AP automation software can enhance your work.
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Blaine K. Sanderson
Blaine K. Sanderson is Senior Product Manager for Procure-to-Pay solutions at MHC, where he leads product strategy and innovation for accounts payable automation. With more than two decades of experience in enterprise content management, workflow automation, and ERP integration, Blaine has deep expertise in helping organizations modernize financial operations across SaaS and on-premises environments. Before joining MHC, he held product management and architecture roles at Bottomline Technologies and 5280 Solutions, shaping AP automation offerings used by leading enterprises.
