At Equipment & Controls, Inc., one person spent perhaps 25 to 30 hours a week submitting invoices. The company sold process-control and automation equipment. Its accounting team, meanwhile, had acquired another occupation: operating other companies’ websites. Each customer wanted a different portal, a different form, a different collection of attachments. A sale had been made. The work of making it payable had barely begun.
- Monto connects suppliers’ accounting systems to customer payment portals.
- It submits invoices, watches their status and gathers exceptions in one view.
- The payoff depends on how much of your team’s week those portals consume.
Monto is built around that second occupation. The fintech connects an enterprise resource planning system, or ERP, to the accounts-payable portals a supplier’s customers insist on using. Its premise is wonderfully specific: making life easier for a buyer can make life harder for the seller. Someone has to connect the two.
01 A $15 start to an expensive chore
Maya Cohen and Nitsan Yerushalmi had worked with ERPs and collections inside finance departments. While studying entrepreneurship, they built an early Monto prototype on a $15 budget, according to the launch announcement. Software developers Yoav Shotland and Gabriel Wertheimer were working on another payments startup. The four joined forces, founding Monto in 2021.
That combination matters. Finance experience supplied the irritating details; software experience supplied a way to stop repeating them. Cohen became CEO, Yerushalmi chief commercial officer, Wertheimer chief product officer and Shotland chief technology officer.
In July 2024, Monto announced $9 million in seed funding led by Scale Venture Partners and a New York office. Verissimo Ventures, F2 Venture Capital, Firsthand Alliance and Room40 Ventures participated, alongside angels including Ariel Maislos. The money would support American expansion and product development. The $15 was a prototype budget, of course, rather than the cost of building the business.
02 The invoice has to get inside
Consider what “send an invoice” can conceal. A supplier creates it in NetSuite or SAP. The buyer requires submission through Coupa or SAP Ariba. The purchase-order reference needs to match. Supporting documents need to arrive. The fields have to satisfy that particular customer’s configuration. Then somebody must discover whether the invoice was accepted.
Monto takes invoices through direct ERP connections or alternatives including API, email and upload. It checks the data against the destination’s requirements, delivers the invoice and tracks subsequent changes. The company advertises coverage of more than 500 AP portals. A shared dashboard brings invoices, purchase orders and payment information together.
- 01 / ERPInvoice enters
- 02 / CHECKCustomer rules
- 03 / PORTALSubmit & monitor
- 04 / CONFIRMPayment status
The distinction is between evidence that your system sent something and evidence that the buyer can act on it. Monto’s October 2026 explanation of purchase-order mismatches describes how an incorrect submission can delay the start of payment terms. A formatting mistake can become a cash-flow problem before a collector ever makes a call.
03 The spreadsheet had reached its limit
At print and marketing producer Imagine, 11 billers handled customer portals. Rejections lived in a shared spreadsheet. The team tried CSV uploads to process invoices in batches, but different customers required different columns. The shortcut kept branching into more work.
Imagine chose Monto to handle those different requirements and bring rejections into one place. Its September 2026 customer story reports 95% zero-touch execution and a 34% reduction in tDSO, its reported days-to-payment measure. Those are vendor-published results from one customer, rather than a promise for every buyer.
ECI’s accounting manager, Matt Bizzack, found Monto at a Cleveland conference in 2025. Another option his network considered covered only one portal; he needed several. ECI says it went live in three weeks. An early practical test arrived when its portal specialist took a two-week vacation. The accounting manager let the automation cover the work.
“I’ve got tons of portals. I needed a comprehensive solution.”
Matt Bizzack / Accounting Manager, ECI
04 A crowded market, a particular job
Monto sells cloud software to supplier-side finance teams. Named customers include Shutterstock, TechTarget, Miro and G2. Its expertise sits at the boundary between accounting systems and customers’ procurement infrastructure: invoice validation, customer-specific submission rules and the retrieval of scattered payment information.
There are alternatives. Billtrust offers AP Portal Delivery, with automatic submission and status tracking, and advertises more than 260 portal integrations. A serious evaluation therefore needs the buyer’s actual customer list, exception types and submission requirements. Counting portal logos is an incomplete purchasing method.
For a finance leader, the comparison starts with a question about labor: who owns the invoice after it leaves the ERP? A submission tool, an outsourced operator and a broader AR suite can all claim to remove work. The useful demonstration follows a real invoice through a rejection, a correction and a status update. That reveals what the team still has to do, and gives it something concrete to compare with its current process.
Monto also works alongside other finance software. Esker publicly discusses its partnership with the company around portal integration and invoice delivery. Monto recruits solution providers, consultants and financial institutions into a partner program. The commercial proposition extends beyond a standalone dashboard: portal connectivity can sit inside a broader accounts-receivable service.
05 Automate the handoff. Keep the judgment.
Demandbase supplies a useful boundary. Its published story reports 76.8% zero-touch processing and getting paid seven days sooner. The team still reviews exceptions, including missing purchase orders and insufficient PO balances. Automation can reveal those problems. It cannot supply a customer’s missing purchasing authority.
The same logic defines fit. If customers pay straightforward emailed invoices, portal automation offers less to remove. If disputes or unwillingness to pay dominate collections, clean submission addresses only part of the delay. Where dozens of customer-specific workflows consume the week, the value becomes much easier to test.
Start by mapping those workflows. Record time spent submitting, how quickly rejection becomes visible, and which exceptions require a person. Test the troublesome customers alongside the easy ones. Monto’s story suggests a practical place to look for improvement: the interval between an invoice leaving your system and entering someone else’s payment process. Before chasing the money, check that the bill got through the door.