Use AR Remittances when your Accounts Receivable team needs to reliably turn customer remittance advice files into customer payment records in your system of record (Workday) and, optionally, payment data files for downstream reporting tools.
This article explains the situations where AR Remittances is a good fit, and when another SmartCustomer capability (such as AR Helpdesk or AP Invoices) may be more appropriate.
Use AR Remittances when…
1. Customers send you remittance advice files
Choose AR Remittances if:
Your customers email remittance advice or payment detail files to a shared AR mailbox, and
Those files are in supported formats:
PDF
CSV
XLS / XLSX
Typical examples:
Bank remittance PDFs summarizing payments made.
Excel or CSV files listing invoices, claim numbers, or policy numbers with paid amounts.
Customer‑generated payment statements that list multiple invoices and amounts against a single payment.
In these cases, AR Remittances:
Ingests the email and attachments from your AR mailbox.
Extracts payment header information and (when configured) remittance advice lines.
Creates customer payment records in Workday and optionally exports a CSV to SFTP.
2. You want to automate creation of Workday customer payments
Use AR Remittances when your primary goal is to reduce manual keying of payments into Workday.
Good candidates include:
High‑volume customers who pay many invoices in a single payment and always send a remittance file.
Customers whose payments are difficult to manage manually because of:
Many invoice lines per remittance.
Frequent partial payments or installments.
Long or complex remittance documents.
AR Remittances is designed to:
Create unapplied Workday payments automatically from remittance data.
Supply Workday with the remittance advice details required for downstream application jobs and reconciliations.
Maintain a link between the Workday payment record and the original remittance document.
AR Remittances does not apply payments to invoices in Workday. Application logic remains in Workday (for example, batch jobs that use remittance advice lines to apply payments).
3. You use Workday as your AR system of record
Use AR Remittances if:
Your Accounts Receivable system of record is Workday, and
You are comfortable using Workday jobs or custom processes to apply payments after they are created.
Today:
AR Remittances creates Workday customer payment records using the Workday connector.
For some deployments, AR Remittances also writes CSV files to SFTP that are consumed by tools such as Workday Prism.
[VERIFY] Confirm whether any additional ERPs beyond Workday are supported for AR Remittances in your target release. If not, document this as “Workday only”.
If you do not use Workday as your AR system of record, AR Remittances is not a fit in its current form.
4. You need a second destination for reporting (for example, Prism)
Use AR Remittances when you want the same payment to be:
Created in Workday as a customer payment, and
Exported as CSV to SFTP for downstream reporting or analytics.
Typical scenarios:
You use Workday Prism or another analytics tool that expects a CSV of payments and related attributes.
You need additional per‑line or customer‑specific attributes that are easier to work with in a flat file than in Workday directly.
In this setup, AR Remittances:
Writes payment data to Workday.
On a configurable schedule (for example, every 1, 4, 12, or 24 hours), writes CSV files to the configured SFTP folder.
Includes the SoR external ID in the CSV so downstream systems can correlate records.
5. You have (or are willing to create) customer‑specific mappings
Use AR Remittances when:
You are ready to invest in customer‑specific extraction and mapping, especially for large or complex remittance files.
You have key customers for whom:
Remittance formats are relatively stable, or
You can standardize the export structure (for example, a shared CSV layout per customer).
Reality for remittances:
There is no universal standard for remittance advice format.
Many customers send:
Excel files using their own column names and layouts, or
PDFs generated from those Excel files.
Some customers send very large files (hundreds of pages) where:
One file represents multiple payments for the same customer.
Pages must be grouped into separate payments using customer‑specific rules.
In these situations, AR Remittances is appropriate only if you can:
Define clear mapping rules for each customer and format, and
Work with implementation teams to tune extraction and maintain those mappings over time.
If you cannot invest in per‑customer mappings and your remittance formats change frequently, AR Remittances may deliver limited automation.
When not to use AR Remittances
1. You are trying to process vendor invoices
If you want to process vendor invoices (AP side) to create invoice records you must pay, you should use:
AP Invoices SmartFlow, not AR Remittances.
Use AP Invoices for:
Supplier invoices sent to AP inboxes.
Two‑way / three‑way match workflows against purchase orders and receipts.
Coding of invoice headers and lines for approval and payment.
AR Remittances is for incoming customer payments, not outgoing vendor invoices.
2. You need collections workflows, not payment creation
If your primary need is to:
Manage overdue invoices,
Track promises to pay,
Schedule collections follow‑ups, or
Update scheduled payment dates and amounts on invoices,
you should use:
AR Collections (for collections workflows), and/or
AR Helpdesk (for invoice‑level inquiries and updates).
AR Remittances assumes the payment has already been made and that the customer is sending you remittance details. It does not:
Drive outbound collection communications.
Update promised payment dates or collection codes on invoices.
3. You only have bank statement data and no remittance files
If you receive:
Only bank statements without detailed per‑invoice remittance advice, and
You do not get separate remittance emails/files from customers,
then AR Remittances may not be appropriate, because:
It expects remittance files (PDF / CSV / Excel) as input.
It is not designed as a generic bank statement ingestion and reconciliation engine.
[VERIFY] If there is existing or planned support for specific bank statement formats as AR Remittance documents, confirm scope and document as a separate sub‑use case.
4. You need generic SFTP ingestion of payments but no mailbox or document processing
If you simply want to move payment data files from one system into another via SFTP, and:
You do not need email/mailbox processing, document classification, or PDF/Excel extraction,
You might be better served by:
The Auditoria Universal Connector (where it supports AR records), or
A dedicated integration pattern managed outside AR Remittances.
AR Remittances is optimized for mailbox‑driven document workflows, not generic flat‑file ingestion without documents.
Summary decision guide
Use AR Remittances when:
You have customer remittance files coming into an AR mailbox.
Your AR system of record is Workday.
Your goal is to automate creation of customer payment records and optionally feed payment data to a reporting system (for example, Prism) via SFTP.
You are prepared to configure customer‑specific mappings for non‑standard remittance formats.
Use a different capability when:
You are working on vendor invoices → AP Invoices.
You are managing collections and promises to pay → AR Collections / AR Helpdesk.
You only have bank statements and no remittance files → consider other reconciliation solutions.
You only need raw payment file ingestion via SFTP without documents → consider Universal Connector or another integration pattern.