Billtrust announced today that we have acquired Open Scan Technologies based in Denver, CO. This is an incredibly interesting deal on so many levels and we couldn’t be more excited to welcome the Open Scan team to Billtrust.
Open Scan has been in business since 1998 and offers a software solution that helps with the “cash application” problem in the B2B payments space. For the 99% of the population that have no idea what this means, I’ll explain.
There are generally two types of billing, usually split along the lines of consumer billing (B2C) and business billing (B2B). Most B2C businesses use balance forward billing where each customer account has an outstanding balance and charges and payments are either added or subtracted from the account. Pretty straightforward.
In the B2B space, open invoice billing is the standard. Invoices are issued for each purchase and remain “open” until a payment or credit is applied. Sounds simple but the process of figuring out which payments apply to which invoices is incredibly expensive, slow, and error prone. Opening envelopes, scanning checks, analyzing remittance detail, handling disputes, and keying into an accounting system can be very complex. A lot of businesses just punt on this problem and pay their bank’s lockbox to do the work. Still expensive but at least it’s out of sight and out of mind.
Open Scan was founded on the premise that this problem can be solved with software. Their Dynamic Receivables solutions can automate over 80% of this process by automatically reading and recognizing remittance data and then matching that to a list of open invoices using sophisticated algorithms.
Billtrust and Open Scan share a bunch of clients and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that maybe other Billtrust customers have the same sort of problems that can be solved by the Open Scan solution.
We partnered with Open Scan in 2013 and it became quickly apparent that this should be more than that; it should be a full-fledged acquisition. The cross sell opportunities, product synergies, and cultural alignment should make this deal a home run. We couldn’t be more excited about joining forces with the Open Scan team.
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