Tillo sends 750 to 900 invoices a month and nobody in finance opens them.
"We're sending them directly over the API and distributing them directly to the customer," says Arron Jennings, the company's Finance Transformation Manager. "We're not even triaging or reviewing these in the UI anymore. They're just directly happening." Revenue lands in the books on T+1.
That is the end state of accounts receivable automation, and it is worth being clear about what it replaced. Not slow invoicing. A queue: the standing list of invoices waiting for somebody to confirm that what the system produced is what the system was told to produce.
invoices a month Tillo issues over the API with no review step in the UI
to process revenue at Famly, per Rasmus Vogt, the company's VP Finance
revenue in the books at Tillo, rather than at the end of a review cycle
The queue is a trust artefact
Nobody reviews outbound invoices because reviewing them adds accuracy. They review them because the invoice was assembled from data that came from somewhere else, and the somewhere else could not be trusted to be current.
That is the honest diagnosis of most AR processes. The contract lives in 1 system, the deal in the CRM, the billing terms in a spreadsheet somebody maintains, and the invoice is a reassembly of all 3 performed monthly. Reassembly introduces error, error justifies review, and review creates the queue. Each step is a reasonable response to the step before it, and the whole structure exists because the invoice was never generated from the record that governs it.
When the contract generates the invoice directly, the review has nothing to catch. There is no reassembly step to introduce a discrepancy between what was agreed and what was billed, because there is only 1 record of what was agreed.
What the time turns into
At Famly, processing revenue took 20 hours. It now takes 15 minutes. The company's VP Finance, Rasmus Vogt, describes the broader change in terms that have nothing to do with speed: Light is "the first solution ever that makes non-finance employees excited about invoices and expenses."
That is the part the category consistently underrates. AR is the function with the most contact with the rest of the business, and most of that contact is friction. Chasing a sales rep for contract terms. Explaining to a customer why the invoice does not match what they were told. Asking an employee for a receipt from 6 weeks ago. Removing the queue removes most of the chasing, and the finance team stops being the department that emails people about paperwork.
"We're not even triaging or reviewing these in the UI anymore. They're just directly happening."
Arron Jennings, Finance Transformation Manager, Tillo
Old model
Assemble, review, send
Terms are pulled from the contract, the CRM and a spreadsheet, reassembled into an invoice, checked by a person, then issued.
Light's model
The contract issues the invoice
Billing runs from the record that governs it. No reassembly, so no discrepancy for a review step to catch.
What changes
Revenue lands on T+1
Tillo: 750 to 900 invoices a month, no triage. Famly: 20 hours to 15 minutes. The backlog stops forming.
Cash follows the same logic
An invoice issued on time is only half of receivables. The other half is knowing what has been paid, and that has traditionally been a separate reconciliation performed after the fact, which is why the collections conversation so often starts with somebody checking whether the customer already paid.
When payment settlement feeds bank reconciliation directly, cash ties back to the invoice it settled without a matching exercise in between. The receivables ledger is current rather than current as at last month-end, and the chase list contains only genuinely overdue invoices rather than invoices that were paid last Tuesday.
What this asks of the team
None of this runs itself into existence. Somebody has to define the billing terms precisely enough that a system can execute them without a human sanity check, which is real work and a genuinely different skill from operating the old process.
That is the shape of the job now. Finance teams that removed the queue did it by encoding their own commercial terms once, carefully, instead of applying them by hand every month. The ones at Tillo, Famly and Oper Credits are not running a faster version of the process they had. They built the thing that replaced it, and the review step disappeared because there was nothing left for it to review.
See how billing and revenue run in Light, or book a demo.