5 Major Customer Portal Issues in Accounts Receivable Automation and How Growfin Solves Them

‍What are Accounts Receivable (AR) Customer Portals?

AR Customer Portals are digital self-service platforms that allow customers to view, manage, pay invoices, raise and track disputes, monitor payment history, and communicate with AR teams. Without relying on phone calls or endless back-and-forth emails threads.

These portals are designed to streamline the billing and collections process, giving customers a unified place to access everything they need related to their account. For finance teams; AR customer portals reduce manual effort, support tickets, and communication to-and-fros while accelerating cash flow by making it easier for customers to pay on time.

On the flipside; your customers expect that degree of self-serve to retain more control over the payments process without constantly banking on your AR team’s manual involvement. In fact, as per a HBR study; 81% of customers attempt to handle matters themselves before reaching out to a service representative.

Customer portals in AR are a more strategic need-to-have and no longer an afterthought good-to-have.

When done right, an AR customer portal can:

• Reduce DSO: By eliminating friction while making payments in terms of resolving disputes faster before they enter an escalation zone
• Lower operational costs: By minimizing disputes, support tickets, manual outreach, and more
• Improve customer experience: Through instant access to invoices, payment options, account details, and more
• Strengthen customer trust and loyalty: Through transparent communication, real-time updates, access to contextual information, and more
• Increase collective strategic bandwidth: AR teams can focus on high-value tasks like dispute resolution, individualized collections strategies, and 1:1 relationship-building

However, as we know: all that glitters (and all that is promised) is seldom gold. Many AR customer portals fall short in terms of expectations and execution. Common issues can turn even the most well-intentioned AR customer portals into points of friction; rather than value.

Major AR Customer Portal Issues

Let’s examine the top problems plaguing customer portals in AR; and how Growfin’s AI-powered AR automation platform transforms them from broken interfaces into modern, intelligent, intuitive, and user-friendly experiences that drive collaborative results:

1. Poor UI/UX Design and Limited 360-Degree Visibility

The Problem:
Most legacy AR customer portals are clunky, confusing, hard to navigate, and designed without the end-user (i.e. the customer) in mind. Menus are buried, layouts are unintuitive, and/or functional responsiveness is often missing. This leads to a poor customer experience that grossly detracts from the autonomy and flexibility that AR customer portals promise.

We’re not the only ones saying it. According to a recent study; 53% of CFOs say that an intuitive, well-designed customer collaboration portal can improve AR collections.

The Business Impact:

• High support volume from frustrated or confused customers
• Delays in invoice access and payment actions due to basic navigation hurdles
• Damage to customer relationships and an overall negative perception of the AR team as “difficult to deal with”

The Growfin Edge:
Growfin’s modern, intuitive AR customer portal interface is built for ease of use and maximum collaboration. With clean layouts and clear navigation; your customers can self-serve quickly and efficiently. Without relying on help from your team.

Your customers can gain complete visibility on their total dues, outstanding payments, and more with filter-functionalities (based on custom date ranges) on an easy-to-comprehend centralized dashboard. They can also track payments, credit notes, access documents, and more.

2. Poor Promise-to-Pay (P2P) Workflow Design

The Problem:
In many legacy AR customer portals, the process for customers to log a Promise-to-Pay (P2P) commitment is anything but straightforward. Often; the option is buried deep in sub-menus, hidden behind confusing labels, or requires multiple clicks and/or manual form-fills. This complexity defeats the purpose of a self-service experience, especially for customers trying to quickly communicate their payment intentions under tight timelines.

Instead of effortlessly setting a payment date and receiving automated reminders, customers are forced to call or email your AR team. This merely adds more administrative work, increasing the risk of missed commitments, payments, and collections targets.

The Business Impact:

• Lost opportunity to secure future payment dates digitally
• Higher likelihood of missed or delayed payments due to unlogged commitments
• Increased inbound calls and emails to AR teams for manual P2P capture
• Lower adoption of portal features meant to improve collections efficiency

The Growfin Edge:
Your customers can easily set and track Promises to Pay (P2P) with a few clicks. This streamlines the payments and collections process by reducing chances of friction and tracking P2P slippages on a centralized dashboard.

3. Broken or Overcomplicated Dispute Management

The Problem:
Submitting a dispute should be quick and painless. But; in many legacy AR customer portals, it’s the opposite. Dispute submission functionalities are difficult to find, hard to navigate to, overly complex, and often require customers to send follow-up emails or make phone calls to provide supporting evidence.
In fact, in a recent study: 78% of finance leaders revealed that their AR teams have encountered payment disputes that could have been resolved faster via better communication.

This friction slows dispute resolution, frustrates customers, and undermines their trust in the AR process. And; unresolved disputes can directly impact payment timelines and cash flow realization. When customers face this level of inefficiency; they may bypass the portal entirely, leading to fragmented records and longer resolution cycles.

Given that the first customer touchpoint is often the portal; a poor dispute experience damages trust from the outset. This only magnifies the likelihood of strained customer relationships and repeat disputes.

The Business Impact:

• Longer dispute resolution cycles, delaying payments
• Increased AR workload to manually capture and manage disputes
• Higher customer frustration, lowering satisfaction and loyalty
• Incomplete or inconsistent dispute records across systems

The Growfin Edge:
Growfin redefines dispute management with a streamlined, customer-friendly digital workflow. Customers can log disputes directly within the portal in just a few clicks without any confusion or option-hunting. Each dispute entry can include supporting documents, screenshots, files, or notes to ensure that your AR team has all the context from the start.

4. Lack of Statement Download Flexibility

The Problem:
For many customers, being able to download account statements is a basic expectation. This includes detailed summaries of invoices, payments, credits, and outstanding balances. Yet; in many legacy AR customer portals, this feature is missing - buried deep within menus and sub-menus, or limited to outdated, static formats that require manual intervention from the AR team.

Without easy statement downloads, customers often have to request this information via email or phone calls; creating delays and friction. For those managing multiple accounts or reconciling transactions in bulk, the inability to instantly access an up-to-date statement can disrupt their internal processes, leading to payment delays and unnecessary back-and-forths.

The Business Impact:

• Increased inbound requests to the AR team for basic statement generation
• Slower customer reconciliation processes, potentially delaying payments
• Lower portal adoption due to this missing self-service feature
• Customer frustration stemming from lack of transparency and autonomy

The Growfin Edge:
Growfin’s AR customer portal makes statement downloads effortless. Customers can generate on-demand, up-to-the-minute statements in multiple formats (PDF, CSV, XLS, XLSX) with just one click. Filters allow them to customize the date range, transaction types, or specific accounts.

With Growfin, statement access is a frictionless, always-available tool that strengthens transparency, improves customer trust, satisfaction, and reduces support workload for AR teams.

5. Incomplete or Outdated Information

The Problem:
Many AR customer portals act as “information graveyards,” filled with outdated invoices, incorrect balances, or missing data. When customers can’t trust the data, they lose confidence. Multiply a similar reality and experience a few times and they may teeter on the edge of churn. Based on compromised customer relationships.

The Business Impact:

• Delayed payments or delinquency due to confusion, lack of visibility, or non-clarity on next-best-action
• Reputation damage to your AR and finance team; in general
• Eroded customer satisfaction and enhanced churn risk

The Growfin Edge:
Growfin’s platform connects in real-time to ERPs, CRMs, AP portals, and more. This ensures that all customer-facing data like invoice statuses, payment histories, and dispute updates are always accurate and current. This builds trust and encourages faster resolution of payment issues.

‍Final Takeaway: Your Customers (and You) Deserve a World-Class AR Customer Portal

Let’s accept it: Your customers expect digital experiences that match what they get from modern consumer platforms. If your AR portal is outdated, hard to use, or inaccurate; it’s a usability issue and a revenue recognition risk.

If you’re dead-serious about reducing DSO, improving cash flow, and elevating your customer experience; your AR customer portal must evolve and keep pace with your growth aspirations. Not just to streamline collections, but; to deliver and sustain customer relationships critical to business.  

Get in touch with us - today - to learn how you can empower your customers with a best-in-class AR customer portal that embeds self-serve personalization and collaboration into the payments process.