Half of Suppliers Remain Invisible to Corporate CFO Systems

A chief financial officer can only optimize the cash they can see.

An invoice arriving outside an integrated B2B environment gives finance less time and potentially less information to decide how the resulting obligation should be managed. Until recently, the inconvenience of missing or incomplete information was relatively avoidable.

But in today’s real-time, always-on, 24/7 commerce landscape, working capital optimization depends on timing. This is not your grandfather’s net 30 and net 60 timing either. It’s microseconds, milliseconds and entirely new units of money movement.

Consider two companies buying the same $100,000 of goods under identical supplier terms. At the first company, the supplier is connected to the buyer’s purchasing and payment infrastructure. The company can potentially see the obligation when the purchase is initiated, match the invoice against the order, route approval automatically, and determine how and when the supplier should be paid.

At the second company, the invoice enters through a disconnected workflow and must be reconciled manually.

Both companies technically have the same payment terms. Economically, however, they do not necessarily have the same flexibility. That distinction is helping define a broader definition of working capital infrastructure where supplier integration is not just an accounts payable efficiency exercise. It can determine how early a company acquires usable information about future cash movements.

Information creates optionality.

Read also: Fed Study Shows B2B Payments Are Becoming a Cost-Per-Event Problem

Working Capital Efficiency Starts With Usable and Connected Information

Purchase orders, invoices, approvals and payments can exist across separate systems and workflows. The closer a transaction gets to its due date before finance has complete information, the narrower its range of working capital choices becomes.

PYMNTS Intelligence’s June “Growth Corporates Working Capital Index” found that, across major industries, roughly half and, in some cases, 60% of suppliers remain outside integrated order and payment systems. This leaves a substantial share of commercial activity beyond the infrastructure designed to tell finance what it owes, when it owes it, and what it can do before the money leaves.

Working capital management has been measured at the end of the process. Days payable outstanding (DPO) measures how long a company holds cash before paying suppliers. Days sales outstanding (DSO) measures how quickly it collects from customers. Inventory metrics capture how long capital remains tied up in goods.

But those measures obscure the quality of the information entering the system, something happening further upstream. In 2025, just 51% of agriculture suppliers were integrated into companies’ order and payment systems, the highest share among the industries measured by PYMNTS Intelligence. Media and technology and commercial travel followed at 49% each, while retail and marketplaces stood at 47%.

Integration dropped further in construction, at 44%, fleet and mobility, at 43%, and healthcare, at 42%. Manufacturing and professional services came in at just 40%. Read in reverse, the figures are more revealing. Between 49% and 60% of suppliers across those industries remain outside integrated order and payment systems.

The PYMNTS Intelligence Tracker “Who Decides Now: How Developers and Tech Teams Are Reshaping the Future of AP Payments” found in July that 58% of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rank integration as very or extremely important when evaluating technology solutions.

See also: Working Capital Is Becoming a Priced Portfolio for CFOs

The Same Integration Rate Can Mean Different Things for Different Businesses

While agriculture leads the measured industries with supplier integration at 51%, that does not automatically mean agricultural businesses have the most efficient working capital. Nor does manufacturing’s 40% rate mean manufacturers necessarily manage cash poorly.

The more fragmented the commercial ecosystem, the harder it can become to translate nominal payment terms into precise control over cash. Manufacturers, for example, can have capital tied up simultaneously in raw materials, work in progress, finished inventory and customer receivables while managing large networks of suppliers. A disconnected supplier relationship therefore sits inside a broader cash-conversion cycle.

For years, one of the simplest working capital strategies was to collect faster and pay slower. There are limits to that approach, and integration creates another lever. When purchasing, invoicing and payments are connected, companies have more ways to alter the economics without necessarily rewriting the underlying commercial terms.

Read also: The Finance Stack’s Great Unbundling Has CFOs Asking What They Need to Own

Middle-market companies have spent years digitizing invoices, automating AP and adding payment methods. Yet the industry figures indicate that substantial portions of supplier ecosystems remain outside fully integrated order and payment environments.

Virtual cards can attach controls to individual transactions, while automated reconciliation can reduce the operational cost associated with executing those strategies at scale. PYMNTS Intelligence’s June “Growth Corporates Working Capital Index” found that 80% of high-performing enterprise finance teams use working capital solutions like virtual cards for planned growth, compared to just 2% of bottom performers. But no tool across the marketplace eliminates the trade-off between buyer liquidity and supplier liquidity.

Somebody still funds the interval between the two. But integration can make that interval visible, measurable and financeable. Once a transaction enters an integrated environment, finance can potentially treat payment timing as a decision rather than an administrative consequence.

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