Accounting automation firm Rillet has raised $13.5 million to develop its platform.
“Today, high-growth companies face a catch-22 when it comes to accounting: use 25-year-old software built for small businesses that doesn’t meet their needs or 25-year-old software built for large corporations that doesn’t either,” the company said in a news release Monday (July 29).
“Either way, finance teams are stuck doing tons of manual work in spreadsheets to reconcile and report their finances. To exacerbate the issue, there are fewer accountants to do this work: 300,000 accountants left the profession in the last two years alone.”
But with advances in software and artificial intelligence (AI), the company said, much of this manual work can be automated, giving finance teams more freedom to conduct more strategic and insightful analysis.
According to the release, Rillet’s platform integrates with companies’ payment processors and CRMs to simplify accounting on the revenue side, running “all kinds of workflow automations that finance teams used to have to do manually — from invoicing to closing the books and running investor reporting.”
The funding round comes as businesses continue to embrace automation in accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) processes to reduce costs, as PYMNTS wrote last week.
Research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows that AP staff have been working extra hours as they use legacy and manual procedures to take care of a growing number of invoices, with three-quarters of AP teams saying they processed more invoices in the last quarter.
“There’s a lot of messiness around payments, particularly very large B2B payments that might house hundreds or thousands of invoices with hundreds of associated line-item details,” Boost Payment Solutions founder and CEO Dean M. Leavitt told PYMNTS. “Large enterprises on both the AP and AR side are looking for ways to automate those processes, digitize them and reduce their cost as well.”
That’s because automated systems can take care of large volumes of transactions with speed and accuracy, freeing up human resources to — as Rillet said — focus on more strategic activities.
“You’ve heard the expression better, cheaper, faster,” Ben Lamm, chief operating officer at Capital One’s Trade Credit Business, told PYMNTS last summer. “I think automation really helps with faster and cheaper.”
Meanwhile, research from PYMNTS Intelligence’s “The 2024 Certainty Project Report” found that uncertainty, especially around payments, costs middle-market companies more than $20 million on average.
“Many of these uncertainties stem from incompatible technologies, manual data entry and the complexities of legacy systems that result in poor data quality,” PYMNTS wrote.
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