By Sabrina Zimara, CMO at iSolutions. iSolutions were finalists in the ‘Best SaaS Product for ERP’ category at the 2026 SaaS Awards.

Strategic decisions that move the needle come from analyzing and understanding the data behind your business. Data can be collected from nearly every touchpoint with a customer or vendor – from initial discovery through the sales process, buying decision, onboarding or sale through ongoing customer satisfaction and additional sales. Each interaction reveals what is working, where friction exists, and how companies can attract new customers, increase revenue, and build lasting relationships.

While KPIs tied to new business and sales growth often dominate the conversation, organizations are less likely to measure the subtle experiences that influence long-term satisfaction and retention. Once a sale is complete, the customer is often handed off to the back office for account management, invoicing, and payment collection. These activities are treated as administrative transactions rather than meaningful customer interactions, creating opportunities for friction that many businesses overlook.

When the payment process is cumbersome, even simple tasks can create unnecessary work for customers. Searching for an invoice, navigating multiple screens, resetting a forgotten password, confirming an outstanding balance, or repeatedly entering payment information can quickly add up to significant time and frustration.

Every additional step creates another opportunity for delayed payment, abandonment, or a call to your finance team for assistance.

The Effort of Making a Payment

When a deal is won or a sale goes through, that’s the beginning of the accounting process. Payment timeliness has a significant impact on cash flow and financial standing, so collecting in a timely manner is of high importance to the AR team. However, many organizations often overlook whether their own processes are making timely payment difficult.

Common challenges for customers related to payments:

• Locating the correct invoice
• Confirming current balance
• Requesting invoice copies
• Navigating multiple payment screens
• Re-entering payment information
• Contacting your accounting team for help

While most customers may intend to pay on-time, unnecessary friction can lead to abandoned payment attempts that delay payment on invoices, which adds up to late payments and additional resource hours required to manage collections.

Why the Payment Effort is Easy to Overlook

Once a customer is passed to accounting, the focus moves away from customer experience to collections. Finance teams focus on days sales outstanding, aging balances, collection rates – metrics that show what happened but not why a customer paid late or needed additional assistance. The payment challenges or delays are frequently blamed on customer behavior rather than when the process itself is creating delays or causing friction. While these individual scenarios can appear minor, they can create significant operational costs when repeated across multiple customers.

The True Cost of a Difficult Payment Process

Nearly every customer has encountered a frustrating payment process. A confusing click-to-pay link may not clearly explain what is owed or which invoices are being paid. An online checkout may require a login, two-factor authentication, and multiple verification steps. A manual process may even require the customer to call or email the company simply to make a payment. What should be a quick, straightforward transaction can quickly become a time-consuming burden.

Although payment may seem like a small part of the overall customer journey, unnecessary friction can leave a lasting impression. Over time, that frustration may become one more reason for customers to take their business elsewhere.

Internally the cost of a difficult payment process can add up to countless resource hours spent on manual collection outreach, fielding calls or emails to the AR team, managing duplicate or incorrectly applied payments, time spent researching customer accounts, and more. Higher administrative costs drive up the cost of goods and services, and squeeze profit margins.

Providing an Easy Payment Experience

Reviewing processes to ensure an easy payment experience will help to reduce administrative, manual efforts and increase customer confidence and satisfaction.

Characteristics of an easy payment experience:

• Customers can easily find what they owe
• Invoice and total balance information is accurate and easy to understand
• Payments can be made directly from an invoice or email through click to pay links
• Payment methods can be saved and applied
• One or multiple invoices can be selected for payment
• Payment confirmation is immediate
• Payments are automatically applied to the correct account and invoices so the customer sees an updated balance and that information is immediately reflected in the ERP solution
• Customers can complete the process without assistance from the AR team
• The end to end process can be completed in only a few minutes

Payment Options to Increase On-Time Payments

Customers have different payment needs and preferences. Providing multiple ways to pay can reduce friction, accommodate more situations, and increase the likelihood of receiving payment on time.

Scenario 1: Customer Needs to Pay a One-Time Invoice

A customer receives an invoice and wants to pay it immediately without creating an account or contacting the finance team. A secure click-to-pay link allows the customer to view the amount due and submit a credit card or ACH payment in just a few steps. Removing logins and unnecessary screens makes immediate payment more likely.

Scenario 2: Customer has Recurring or Ongoing Invoices

A long-term customer receives invoices regularly for ongoing orders or services. With a secure payment method on file and automatic payment options, invoices can be paid on a scheduled date or when they become due. This reduces the risk of missed deadlines while giving the customer a predictable, convenient experience.

Scenario 3: Customer with Multiple Invoices or Orders

A customer with multiple invoices needs to understand their complete account balance. With a self-service payment portal, they can view open invoices, confirm balances, select which invoices to pay or how much of an invoice to pay, and submit payment using saved payment methods – whether that be ACH or credit card. Giving customers clear, convenient access to their account information reduces confusion, eliminates unnecessary communication with the finance team, and encourages faster payment.

While these scenarios don’t address every situation, they showcase a few of the different options that are available to make the payment process easier and faster for customers.

Measuring Payment Effort

There are practical ways every organization can start to measure the effort it takes for customers to make a payment. These milestones or KPIs should be measured along with the typical KPIs mentioned above such as days sales outstanding. Tracking these indicators alongside traditional AR metrics can help organizations determine how improvements to the payment experience affect payment speed, collection activity, and administrative workload.

• Number of steps required to make a payment
• Average time needed to complete a payment
• Percentage of payments completed without AR assistance
• Number of invoice-copy and balance-inquiry requests
• Password-reset or portal-access requests
• Abandoned payment attempts
• Duplicate payments
• Percentage of customers using self-service
• Adoption of saved payment methods and AutoPay
• Customer feedback following payment

On top of measurement, have internal team members make a purchase and complete the payment process and provide feedback.

Measuring the Payment Process Will Lead to Faster Payment

Making payments easier it not only a customer experience initiative, nor is it simply a change in internal processes. The benefits expand beyond to improve cash flow, reduce collection activity, and give the AR team more time to focus on higher value activities.

Organizations already measure when customers pay, how much is outstanding, days sales outstanding, and other key accounts receivable metrics. But measuring the effort required to complete a payment adds important context to those results. By identifying unnecessary steps, offering payment options that fit different customer needs, and tracking how often customers require assistance, businesses can remove barriers that may be delaying payment.

The easier it is for customers to understand what they owe and complete a payment confidently, the more likely they are to pay accurately and on time. The payment process should be measured as a standard KPI like other customer touchpoints. By understanding where friction exists and using that data, companies can make better, more informed decisions to reduce administrative work and build stronger customer relationships.