Kolleno Payments
When finance leaders talk about improving cash flow, remittances rarely top the list. But iIf you’re managing NetSuite cash application manually, the cracks start to show fast.
Slow, manual cash application makes it hard to track what’s paid and what’s still outstanding. It creates gaps in your financial statements and delays important decisions.
If you’re running NetSuite and your team is drowning in remittance emails, bank files, and open invoices, this piece is for you. Here’s what’s going wrong—and how the right NetSuite cash application fix can restore control.
The Problem with Remittances Today
On the surface, remittances seem simple—just a customer telling you what they’re paying for. But in reality, they’re one of the most fragmented, unreliable parts of the accounts receivable process. And for finance teams using NetSuite, they often create more questions than answers.
Here’s how they disrupt your operations and hold back cash flow management.
Unstructured Formats Make Automation Difficult
NetSuite cash application is often slowed down by messy remittance formats and missing references. Remittance data can arrive in any format—PDFs, email text, spreadsheets, even handwritten notes. That variability makes it difficult to automate cash application because there’s no standard structure to work with.
As a result, your team spends hours manually reviewing documents just to extract the basic information needed to match a payment to an open invoice.
Slower Cash Application Leads to Delayed Cash Flow
When remittances don’t clearly match payments to invoices, your team has to pause. They can’t post the payment until they’re sure it’s correct. That delay means payments sit unapplied for days—or longer.
And if the remittance is incomplete or missing altogether? That means more follow-ups, more manual data entry, and a growing backlog that slows down your ability to accurately manage cash flow.
Revenue Recognition Is Thrown Off
When remittances are unclear or payments are posted late, it disrupts the entire revenue cycle. You can’t recognise income until you’re sure it’s been paid and properly applied.
That creates issues in your financial statements, throws off month-end closes, and reduces confidence in your reporting. For finance leaders, it adds noise at exactly the time you need clarity.
Productivity Plummets as Teams Chase Answers
Remittance management is repetitive work. Searching through email threads, opening attachments, matching line items—it’s tedious and resource-draining. It also opens the door to costly mistakes, especially during busy periods. Plus, inconsistent remittance formats make accurate record keeping more difficult than it should be.
The more remittances you manage, the more manual work is required—unless you’re automating. And most accounting teams aren’t, especially in businesses where NetSuite is used without additional automation layers.
This kind of manual labor isn’t sustainable for growing finance teams.
The Real Impact on Cash Flow and Productivity
When remittances are poorly managed, the effects ripple through your entire finance function. It’s not just about admin overload—it’s about slower payments, delayed reporting, and missed opportunities to take control of your cash flow.
When payments sit unapplied, they don’t show up in your accounts receivable ledger—even if the money’s already in the bank. That disconnect makes it harder to understand your true cash position, forecast effectively, or make timely financial decisions. Missed or delayed remittance data can also cause hold-ups in recognising revenue, leading to inconsistencies in your financial statements and reduced trust in the numbers.
But that’s not all.
When your team is buried in manual work, they can’t focus on higher-value tasks. Time spent decoding remittance formats or chasing missing references is time not spent on analysis, forecasting, or improving cash flow management. Instead of strategic work, your team is buried in repetitive tasks that shouldn’t exist in a modern finance function. These delays make it harder to gain complete visibility over your cash position
They also increase the risk of costly mistakes. Misapplied payments lead to incorrect financial statements, duplicate follow-ups, and missed opportunities to recognize revenue accurately. These aren’t just technical errors—they affect how the business sees its performance, and how confident leaders can be in the numbers.
Over time, all of this takes a toll on morale. When skilled professionals spend hours fixing avoidable issues, it creates frustration. It also makes it harder to scale, because adding more volume simply means adding more pain.
This isn’t a question of effort. It’s a question of infrastructure.
Why NetSuite Alone Isn’t Enough for Accounts Receivable
NetSuite is a powerful ERP and accounting software. It gives you a central view of your financial records, helps manage accounts receivable, and supports a wide range of financial operations. But when it comes to cash application—especially at scale—it has limitations.
Out of the box, NetSuite offers basic payment processing and reconciliation tools. But it still relies heavily on manual data entry, especially when handling remittance data in varied formats. PDFs, emails, and wire transfers don’t flow neatly into the system. Your team ends up chasing down references, manually linking payments to open invoices, and toggling between systems to check accuracy.
That’s fine when volumes are low. But for businesses operating across multiple customers, currencies, and payment types, it creates bottlenecks fast. It also increases the risk of unauthorized financial transactions, missed early payment discounts, or delays in revenue recognition.
Put simply, while ERP systems like NetSuite offer a solid foundation, they’re not optimised for remittance handling at scale.
What to Look for in a Better Solution
To fix the remittance problem, your team doesn’t need more headcount. It needs a system that reduces manual work and integrates cleanly with NetSuite. The right solution can help your finance team apply cash faster, with fewer errors and less back-and-forth.
Modern cash application tools (like Kolleno) combine automation, intelligence, and real-time sync to simplify the entire process. Here’s what to prioritise when evaluating your options.
Smart Remittance Capture
Remittance advice arrives in all shapes and formats—email attachments, PDFs, scanned files. Solutions like Kolleno use optical character recognition (OCR) to pull out key remittance data instantly. This eliminates retyping, reduces mistakes, and ensures payments are tied to the correct open invoices right from the start.
Automated Matching to Open Invoices
A strong platform uses a combination of rule-based logic and AI to match payments to open invoices automatically. That means fewer exceptions, faster reconciliation, and more time for your team to focus on edge cases—not routine matches.
Real-Time Sync with NetSuite
Look for tools that offer native integration with NetSuite. This avoids duplication, improves reporting, and gives you confidence that the numbers reflect reality.
Support for Diverse Payment Methods
Whether you’re dealing with wire transfers, electronic funds transfer, or card-based payments, your tool should adapt seamlessly. The best platforms effortlessly handle a wide range of payments without requiring manual adjustments.
Clear, Actionable Reporting
Dashboards provide complete visibility, helping finance teams work more efficiently, reduce risk, and support regulatory compliance. This is especially valuable when scaling operations or managing multiple entities.
How Automation Fixes the Problem
The more volume you manage, the less viable manual processes become. Automation solves this—not by adding complexity, but by removing it.
Automated cash application software streamlines NetSuite cash application. It takes the repetitive, error-prone parts of the process and handles them instantly. Payments are matched to open invoices using predefined rules or intelligent algorithms. Remittance data is extracted automatically—whether from PDFs, emails, or file uploads—so your team doesn’t need to spend hours entering it by hand.
Kolleno’s automation engine gives finance teams the speed and control they need. It matches payments in real time, applies them directly in NetSuite, and flags only the exceptions that need a second look. The result? Faster processes, greater accuracy, and less manual effort.
It also keeps reconciliation running continuously. Payments and matches sync straight into your general ledger, so there’s no need to rush through cleanup at month-end. You always know what’s been paid and what still needs attention.
This level of automation sharpens your financial visibility. It frees up your team to focus on planning, cash management, and the decisions that drive the business forward.
Final Thoughts
Remittances aren’t going away, but that doesn’t mean they should continue to be a thorn in your finance team’s side.
If you’re using NetSuite and still relying on manual cash application, the pressure will build fast. As payment volumes grow, so does the chance of delays and errors. That slows your ability to manage cash, close the books, and act on reliable data.
Kolleno removes the manual burden. By automating data entry and reconciliation, it brings structure to your processes and frees your team to focus on work that drives value.
Ready to see how it works in action? Book a demo to see how Kolleno can transform your NetSuite cash application process.
