The AI-Driven Customer Portal for Faster, Cleaner Collections
Key Takeaways
The B2B order-to-cash process often remains analog, leading to visibility issues and payment delays due to opaque communications and lost invoices.
AI-enabled self-service portals, such as Serrala’s, facilitate a frictionless payment experience and can significantly reduce Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) by providing customers with real-time access to account information and enabling autonomous dispute resolution.
Implementing AI-driven solutions allows Accounts Receivable teams to focus on strategic tasks by automating manual processes and improving the overall efficiency of collections and payment management.
Paying a bill is invisible in business-to-consumer (B2C) industries. A few taps, a biometric scan, and the transaction is settled. However, for many business-to-business (B2B) organizations running sophisticated SAP landscapes, this last mile of the order-to-cash process remains surprisingly analog. It is often defined by opaque email threads, lost PDF invoices, and the frustrating game of ‘did you receive my payment?’
This friction has proved to be a barrier to liquidity for finance and Accounts receivable (AR) professionals in B2B. This is also because the modern B2B buyers expect the same autonomy, and intelligence, they have in their personal lives, but traditional collections processes often force them into manual, high-friction workflows that AI can now eliminate.
The Black Box of B2B Collections
The core issue for many B2B SAP users is visibility—not just for the internal team, but also for the customer. When an invoice leaves the ERP, it often enters a black box. Customers struggle to verify what they owe, cannot easily access copies of missing invoices, and have limited channels to dispute a charge without initiating a lengthy email chain. Without an intelligent layer to guide customers to the right invoice, right amount, and right action, every exception becomes a delay.
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This lack of transparency leads to payments being withheld until queries are resolved, artificially inflating Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and straining business relationships.
The Shift to Self-Service Portals
AI-enabled self-service portals are emerging in the market to provide the autonomous experiences business customers expect. Exemplified by platforms like Serrala’s B2B customer portal, the industry is shifting towards self-service collections. Customers gain a direct view of their account status, synchronized in real time with a supplier’s SAP system. Across buying and selling ecosystems customers, suppliers and regulatory bodies are coming together to simplify payment experiences.
A secure, 24/7 portal removes the friction points that delay payment. When customers are given agency, they pay faster. Serrala’s analysis suggests a potential reduction in DSO by up to 25% when payment barriers are removed.
More Than a Pay Now Button
Serrala’s robust customer portal acts as a centralized communication hub that benefits both customers and businesses. Customers and suppliers gain the visibility they need and want to quickly get answers to common payment questions and pay online. Businesses can better manage disputes. Instead of disjointed emails, disputes can be raised and resolved directly within the platform, creating a digital audit trail that benefits both parties. Serrala’s customer portal:
- Reduces the volume of support tickets and speeds time to resolution: By allowing customers to self-retrieve invoices and statements, organizations can see billing-related support tickets drop by up to 40%.
- Delivers anywhere, anytime, payment flexibility: Whether it’s digital wallets or traditional bank transfers, offering the customer’s preferred payment method eliminates the ‘we can’t process this’ excuse.
- Frictionless disputes: Customers can flag specific line items rather than rejecting whole invoices. This granularity prevents minor disagreements from stalling large payments.
The Human Impact on AR Teams
The most underrated benefit of this portal is the change it brings to the daily lives of AR professionals. When manual, repetitive queries are offloaded to an AI-powered customer portal, finance teams are freed from low-value administrative work. They can pivot from being reactive chasers to proactive strategic partners, focusing their energy on complex accounts and high-value relationship management.
What This Means for SAPinsiders
For SAP leaders, the portal isn’t just a nicer customer experience, it’s a clean-core-friendly way to bring AI to the last mile of AR. You get faster cash, fewer exceptions, and zero custom code headaches:
- Keep a clean core while adding an AI-enabled customer layer. Serrala’s customer portal is SAP-certified and cloud-native, so you extend SAP without custom interfaces that break on upgrades. Because the portal reads and writes back to SAP in real time, customers and AR teams work from the same source of truth, and AI can confidently guide customers to pay the right invoice, in the right way, at the right time.
- Automate the last mile of matching with AI-assisted remittance capture. When customers pay through Serrala’s customer portal, they select the exact SAP line items they’re settling. AI captures that remittance digitally at the source and sends it into SAP with high-confidence matching, automatically clearing open items. The result: fewer unapplied cash scenarios, less manual reconciliation, and faster period close without OCR or inbox chasing.
- Deflect Tier-1 ‘where is my invoice?’ traffic with intelligent self-service. By securely exposing real-time SAP invoices, credit memos, and payment history, customers solve routine questions on their own, often with AI-guided search and prompts. They can initiate structured disputes directly in the portal, so issues route to the right function automatically, without AR playing email middle-man.
