A recent survey by Treasury & Risk Magazine reveals that only half of companies with revenues under $2 billion have automated either their accounts receivable (A/R) or accounts payable (A/P) processes:

Just over half of the firms that participated in the survey use an ERP system (56%, up from 43% last year) and 25% have a treasury work station (up from 23% last year).

Business to business payments (B2B) remain stubbornly paper based – nearly three quarters of payments are made by check. Large companies have invested in EDI and send/receive electronic payments with their primary trading partners (often other large companies) but have to resort to checks to pay the long tail of smaller suppliers that they do business with. And those smaller suppliers, tend to rely more heavily on manual processing. In order to overcome the paper bias in B2B payments ERP and accounting solutions for small businesses need to more effectively integrate electronic payment, via ACH and cards.

Here at Glenbrook, we’ve initiated an qualitative survey of SME accounting and ERP packages to examine e-payment capabilities. We’ll report back here with posts on individual solutions and conclude with our over all findings.