Most mid-market finance stacks treat accounts payable and accounts receivable as two different products. One tool captures supplier invoices. Another bills customers. A spreadsheet tracks who paid. A fourth system chases overdue balances. The ledger only sees the finished postings, so the team re-keys the same customer and amount three times before month-end.
Cortena started with payables because that is where European SMEs burn the most hours. Receivables is now live on the same data model and approval logic. You issue from CRM and other sources, clear cash when it lands, and chase by customer class, without leaving the workspace you already use for supplier invoices.
Why AP without AR is only half a loop
Closing the books needs both sides. Open payables tell you what will leave the bank. Open receivables tell you what should arrive. When those live in separate tools, cash forecasting becomes a weekly export exercise, and e-invoice mandates become two projects instead of one.
Germany already requires every domestic business to receive structured e-invoices. From 2027, businesses above €800,000 prior-year turnover must also issue them in domestic B2B. Teams that only fixed the inbound side discover the gap when sales still produces visual PDFs with no embedded XML.
Same control model as payables: you set the rules, you approve, nothing posts without sign-off.
CRM-to-invoice: issue from data you already keep
Receivables starts where commercial reality already lives. Cortena connects to CRMs and other data sources so you can pull customers, deals and billing fields into a draft invoice instead of re-keying into a separate billing tool. Compose, review, and issue in one flow.
That matters for small finance teams. The person who codes supplier invoices is often the same person who sends customer invoices. Keeping both jobs in one operator workspace cuts context switching and keeps customer master data consistent with what you already booked on AP.
ZUGFeRD EN 16931 on every issued invoice
When an invoice moves to issued, Cortena generates a ZUGFeRD 2.x / EN 16931 hybrid PDF. Humans can open it like any invoice. Machines read the embedded CII data. That hybrid is the practical B2B format for many German SMEs heading into the 2027 issuance duty.
Peppol send and XRechnung B2G delivery are on the near-term roadmap and available soon. Until those ship, ZUGFeRD outbound covers the core domestic B2B case without forcing customers onto a second e-invoice portal.
- Issue from CRM and other data sources without re-keying customer and deal fields.
- Outbound document is a ZUGFeRD 2.x / EN 16931 hybrid on issue.
- Payment advice processing clears open items when remittance data arrives.
- Bank reconciliation matches cash lines to receivables the same way it matches payables.
- Dunning follows the cadence you set per customer category or class.
- Booking-ready handoff to DATEV, Exact Online or Twinfield on the same path as AP, with a GoBD-aligned trail.
Payment advice, bank match, and dunning by customer class
Issuing the invoice is only the start. Remittance advice rarely matches one invoice to one payment. Customers short-pay, combine invoices, or pay with a reference your bank truncates. Cortena processes payment advice and matches bank lines to open items. Exceptions stay visible so a person can clear them without rebuilding a chase spreadsheet.
Dunning is not one generic sequence. Reminders and escalation follow the rules you set per customer category or class. Strategic accounts can get a softer cadence. High-risk classes escalate faster. Approvals stay with your team.
What this changes for a two-to-five person finance team
You stop maintaining a separate AR stack for the sake of e-invoice compliance. Supplier invoices and customer invoices share coding conventions, approval culture, and ledger handoff. Cash in and cash out live next to each other when you need a 30- or 90-day view.
Typical Cortena results on payables still apply as context for the full loop: around 90% of invoice volume coded without human touch after setup, roughly 30 seconds per invoice, live in about 15 days, and more than 50,000 invoices already processed across customers. Your onboarding sizing confirms the numbers on your own volume.
See the full loop on your books
If receivables is still a PDF export from CRM plus a chase list in Sheets, the AP/AR loop is open. Book a demo. We walk a CRM-sourced customer invoice through ZUGFeRD issue, payment advice matching, and category-specific dunning, then show how the same workspace already runs your payables.