A Billtrust finance chief says automating invoices can leave cash uncollected, and offers a simple test for any new tool that promises to speed up billing.
Faster invoicing does not mean faster payment. That is the argument from David Zwick, chief financial officer at Billtrust, in a PYMNTS eBook called "Payments Leaders Rethink What Works in 2026." He says he used to believe the opposite, and a survey changed his mind.
Zwick says he spent years pushing his team toward automation. The goals were fewer manual steps, faster processing and cleaner reconciliations, which means matching up records so the books agree. He measured success by shorter cycle times, better staff efficiency and fewer errors when closing the books. He assumed cash would follow efficiency on its own.
Billtrust ran a survey of finance leaders that has not been published yet. Zwick shared several results:
Credit-to-cash means the full path from giving a customer credit to collecting the payment. Zwick had assumed forecast misses were a problem for less advanced finance teams, not well-automated ones.
His main point is that the two goals only look related on a dashboard. A company can automate every manual step in collecting what it is owed and still have money sitting unpaid. Processing an invoice quickly says nothing about how quickly the customer pays it. The better question, he writes, is how fast earned revenue becomes cash the company can put to work.
In the fourth quarter, Zwick says he stopped treating automation numbers as a stand-in for financial health. He now asks a second question about any process change: how much faster will it turn earned revenue into usable cash? If the honest answer is that it will not, he no longer counts it as a cash project. It may still be worth doing for other reasons. He says this has changed which projects get called urgent and which get called nice-to-have.
He still backs automation. His view is that it is necessary but not enough on its own.
The survey comes from Billtrust, and the results are not yet public. The material does not say how many leaders were asked. Still, the test is easy to borrow. Before buying a billing or invoicing tool, ask whether it gets money into the bank sooner, not just whether it saves time on paperwork.
Before adopting a billing tool, ask whether it gets you paid sooner, not only whether it saves your team time.
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