I've spent more than two decades working in accounting technology, and one of the things that still surprises me is how much of the financial infrastructure between businesses has barely changed in thirty years.
Think about what happens when a business sends an invoice to a customer today. They create it in QuickBooks, export it as a PDF, email it to someone at the other company, who then manually keys the same information into their own accounting system. Every field. Every line item. Every amount. Typed in again by a human being who could be doing something that actually requires a human’s judgment.
This is not a technology problem. The technology to fix it has existed for years. So let’s be honest: it's an infrastructure problem. The accounting platforms that most businesses rely on were not designed to communicate with each other. They were designed to be good at managing a single company's books, not at moving structured data cleanly between two companies doing business together.
The result is a financial ecosystem that forces businesses to exchange documents instead of data. PDFs instead of structured records. Email threads instead of system-to-system confirmation. And a reconciliation process at month’s end that exists entirely because nobody designed a better way for the two sides of a transaction to stay in sync automatically.
The cost of this is real, and it adds up fast. According to APQC's 2024-2025 benchmarking data, the median cost to process a single invoice manually sits at $21.40 when you factor in data entry, approval routing, and reconciliation. Ardent Partners puts the range even higher for organizations with primarily manual workflows, at $15 to $40 per invoice. For a business processing hundreds of invoices a month, that's a huge line item that’s going largely unexamined, because it's distributed across everyone's time rather than showing up as a single bill.
But the dollar cost is almost secondary to the visibility cost. When invoice and payment data lives in emails and PDF attachments instead of connected systems, finance teams are constantly operating on
incomplete information. Cash flow forecasts are built on what someone entered last week rather than what's actually happening now. Payment status lives in someone's inbox. Reconciliation is a monthly exercise in reconstruction rather than a real-time view of reality.
The accounting software industry has made enormous progress on individual firm capabilities. AI, automation, real-time reporting, these are genuine improvements that have made finance teams meaningfully more effective. But almost none of that progress has addressed the gap between businesses. The infrastructure for interoperability between accounting platforms, the ability for one business's system to communicate directly with another's, has been left largely unsolved.
The opportunity here is significant. When two businesses connect at the system level rather than exchanging documents, the entire workflow changes. Invoices become structured data that flows directly into the recipient's system as a drafted Bill. Payment status is visible to both parties in real time. Remittance information arrives with the payment instead of separately or not at all. Reconciliation happens automatically rather than at month end.
This is not a vision. It is achievable with existing technology. What it requires is accounting platforms and payments infrastructure that are designed with interoperability as a first principle rather than an afterthought.
The businesses that figure this out, and the platforms that enable them to, will spend the next decade looking back and wondering why it took so long to stop sending PDFs.
About Nick Chandi
Nick Chandi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Forwardly, the AI-native business payments platform connecting businesses, vendors, and accounting systems through the Forwardly Network. Forwardly enables agnostic accounting data sync across leading platforms including QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics, helping businesses across the US move money and financial data without the manual work. Access free network payments for your business at Forwardly.com.