Finance operations: why strong AP and AR are a growth lever

I spent most of my career on the revenue side, building partnerships and scaling teams. AP and AR were never my direct responsibility. But I kept running into them. They turned out to be one of the strategic levers driving growth.

A client relationship that started well went sour over a billing dispute. A vendor lost trust because payments were slow. The fix is straightforward: give the operations team visibility into the finance side of the accounts they're handling.

The invoice is part of the relationship

Client trust gets built in a lot of places: a website, a sales conversation, a demo, a contract.

Let’s take Alta Vista Technology as an example. The implementation team works hard to build trust. They learn the client's systems and their team dynamics. By go-live, that relationship is solid.

Then the invoice arrives late, a payment gets misapplied, or a dispute sits in someone's inbox for two weeks because no one is quite sure who owns it.

The customer success team feels it too if the billing experience is clunky. Customers may ask for historical records, or simply check in to confirm payment went through and their subscription won't be frozen.

AP is the other side of the same story

The same dynamic plays out internally with how we pay our vendors and partners. Those relationships are built on trust and reliability, the same qualities we work to deliver to our clients. 

This is especially true for construction and manufacturing businesses that are heavy on material. Suppliers notice when AP is manual and slow, and they will start to factor it into how they prioritize their work with you. Early payment discounts get missed. Reconciliation eats up time that should be going toward strategic decisions.

I've seen finance teams spend the better part of a week chasing down payment confirmations that the right system would have resolved automatically. That's time the business pays for, even when it never appears as a line item.

Financial infrastructure is growth infrastructure

A manual AR process works fine at twenty clients but starts to crack at fifty, because no one has time to track which invoices are overdue and follow up on all of them. An AP workflow held together by spreadsheets and email becomes a liability the moment the one person who understands it leaves, or a vendor relationship gets complicated and no one can trace the payment history.

When I was scaling revenue operations, we treated financial infrastructure with the same discipline we bring to building a revenue engine. Where are the bottlenecks? Where is the team spending time that a system should be handling?

Strong AR and AP operations don't just keep the books clean, they also give the finance team time to report on what matters.

What this looks like in practice

Recently, we sat down with Sarah-Jayne Martin, Senior Director of Financial Automation Solutions at Quadient, for an episode of the AVT Podcast. Sarah-Jayne spent over a decade leading global order-to-cash operations before becoming a power user of the solution she now helps build.

She described walking into a broken AR process on day one: thirteen people, mostly temps, chasing invoices by hand. Then what changed once the right system was in place.

"We were able to reduce a lot of that inbound noise and chaos, which then enabled my team to really focus more on the strategic problems."

It's part of why we partner with teams like Quadient: practitioners who have run these operations themselves and built solutions around how finance teams actually work.

A closing thought

Clients and vendors feel the effects of your back office, and it shapes whether they stay or go.

The businesses that get ahead treat AR and AP with the same rigor as their sales pipeline: measured, owned, and built to scale. That discipline is why renewals close on schedule, vendor terms stay in your favor, and finance teams spend their time on strategy instead of cleanup.

Growth-minded companies give the back office the same priority as the front.

🎙️ Listen to the full conversation with Sarah-Jayne Martin at Quadient: https://youtu.be/oaRBTLhY9S0‍