Automation and cash generation aren’t the same, Billtrust Chief Financial Officer David Zwick writes in a new PYMNTS eBook, “Payments Leaders Rethink What Works in 2026.”

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In January, I believed automation was the finish line. As a CFO, I’d spent years pushing my own team toward it because of fewer manual touches, faster processing and cleaner reconciliations. I measured success the way most finance leaders do, with cycle time down, headcount efficiency up and fewer errors in the close. I believed that if we automated enough of the credit-to-cash process, the cash would take care of itself. Efficiency was the goal, and I thought cash followed efficiency automatically.

What changed my mind was a soon-to-be-published survey Billtrust ran, polling finance leaders on exactly this question. I expected the results to validate what I already believed. The one finding that made me pause instead was that 67% of finance leaders miss their monthly cash forecast by more than 5%, and 45% miss by 16% or more in a function that’s expected to forecast cash with the same precision a sales team forecasts revenue. I’d assumed that was a problem for less mature finance teams, not well-automated ones.

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