PaperTrl Adds Virtual Cards to Construction Payments Platform

Construction industry platform PaperTrl is offering virtual card payments with U.S. Bank’s help.

PaperTrl, which offers an accounts payable (AP) management and automation platform for construction firms, announced Wednesday (April 26) that the integration lets its customers automate AP operations from procurement through payment.

“By joining forces with U.S. Bank, we can better support our customers in the mid-market by directly embedding a leading virtual card into the AP process to add efficiencies for AP teams and stronger visibility and control over spend for CFOs,” PaperTrl Chief Executive Steve Weber said in a news release.

The integration’s capabilities include vendor management, purchasing, receiving, invoice processing and payments using U.S. Bank virtual commercial cards.

“Together, PaperTrl and U.S. Bank will help AP departments manage all B2B payments from a single platform, eliminate manual processing and help to reduce fraud,” the release said.

As PYMNTS reported recently, the more companies embrace automation in payment processing, the more they move to embrace it across their businesses.

“If you think about it from the supplier standpoint, the organizations receiving the payments are probably the most data-hungry and get the most value from data,” said Zachary Lynn, head of revenue operations at Boost Payment Solutions.

“It’s not only from data they receive but also data that we remove from their environment,” Lynn told PYMNTS. “The data they receive, like remittance data and the payments data that they can reconcile into their AR [accounts receivable] software, is extremely valuable to help their operations. At the same time, removing certain data from their environment makes them more operationally efficient.”

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS and American Express finds that construction firms — facing lower housing starts and rising mortgage rates — are increasingly turning to digital payment tools to increase cash flow and clear accounts receivable (AR) faster and cheaply.

That’s according to “Building Better Cash Flow In Construction With Digital Payments,” which details the pressures construction firms are facing and how they’re coping through a greater reliance on digital tools.

“Getting paid on time is a major roadblock in the construction industry, disrupting cash flow for U.S. construction professionals. Only 11% of construction professionals say they are paid in full on every job, and the impacts can be devastating,” the report says, adding that 97% of construction professionals feel a strain from slow payments and cash flow troubles.