By Marketron | Featured on BIA
In this special edition of BIA Advisory Services’ Vantage Points series, we invited Marketron to share strategies to improve cash flow and accelerate collections for broadcast stations through digital payment tools, electronic invoicing, and streamlined accounts receivable workflows. As payment delays continue to challenge the industry, leading stations are reducing friction and turning receivables into a strategic advantage. Enjoy the discussion and see key links to learn more at the end of the article.
What the stations are doing differently this year to stay ahead on collections before Q3 catches up with them.
Summer is supposed to be a season of momentum. Campaigns are running. Sponsorships are locked in. Revenue is on the books. But for too many broadcast stations, the reality behind the scenes looks a little different: a pile of outstanding invoices, check payments trickling in weeks late, and a finance team stretched thin trying to reconcile it all before Q3 closes.
It’s a familiar pattern and increasingly, an avoidable one.
The stations navigating summer cash flow with the least friction share a few things in common. They’ve moved away from manual, check-dependent receivables processes. They have given their teams better visibility into what’s outstanding, and they’ve made it easier for advertisers to pay.
The Numbers Behind the Slowdown
The media industry’s AR problem isn’t a perception issue. It’s structural.
When checks are the primary payment method, the average days-to-pay in the media industry sits at 72 days, nearly two and a half months between sending an invoice and seeing the money. For a station billing $500K a month, that’s over $1.2 million in receivables outstanding at any given moment tying up working capital.
Summer intensifies it. Key advertiser contacts go on vacation. Approval chains slow down. Invoices that would normally be paid in three weeks stretch to five. And without a system built to follow up automatically, the burden falls on whomever happens to be in the office.
The broader B2B market is dealing with the same friction and starting to move decisively away from it. New Mastercard research published in May 2026 found that 32% of card-accepting suppliers reported improved payment visibility and 30% cited faster processing compared with peers still relying on manual receivables methods.
What Smarter AR Looks Like in Practice
Stations that have reduced their days outstanding aren’t necessarily doing something radically different; they’ve just removed the steps that were slowing everything down.
Electronic invoicing as the default. Rather than mailing paper invoices or manually emailing PDFs, leading stations have moved to systems where invoices are pushed automatically from their traffic platform the moment they’re ready. The invoice lands in the advertiser’s inbox not a mail truck and the clock on payment starts immediately.
Frictionless payment options for advertisers. One of the most consistent findings from stations that have improved collection speed: the easier it is to pay, the faster people pay. That means offering ACH and credit card options, eliminating the requirement to create an account, and meeting advertisers where they already are…their inbox and their phone. Marketron’s PayNow platform recently launched a QR code feature, placing the code directly on invoices and pre-payment requests so advertisers can scan and pay in under a minute without navigating a portal. Early adoption reflects a broader industry shift toward scan-to-pay convenience in B2B transactions.
Pre-payment requests that eliminate the manual back-and-forth. For recurring advertisers or high-value campaigns, pre-payment workflows allow stations to request payment before a flight even begins, reducing the post-campaign chase entirely. When that request arrives with a scannable QR code or a one-click link, the friction of “I’ll get to it later” largely disappears.
Giving AEs visibility into what’s outstanding. Historically, collections have lived entirely in accounting. But stations seeing real improvement in DSO have started bridging that gap giving account executives real-time access to outstanding balances for their accounts, and the ability to send a payment link directly from within that same view. The AE becomes a natural, low-friction touchpoint for follow-up, without needing to route everything through finance.
The Results Stations Are Reporting
Stations that have adopted electronic payment platforms are reporting up to a 32-day reduction in days sales outstanding bringing the industry average of 72 days down to approximately 40. At scale, that’s a significant shift in working capital. The same $500K-per-month station that had $1.2 million in outstanding receivables could free up more than $500K in cash just by collecting faster.
Beyond DSO, a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia study estimated that businesses adopting electronic payment collection can reduce AR costs by up to 75% eliminating postage, paper processing, manual data entry, and the labor hours that go into reconciliation every month.
The feedback from stations that have made the switch is consistent. “PayNow streamlines billing, boosts our cash flow and makes reconciliation 100% easier,” said Nikki Watkins of Waterloo Media. Others have noted that pre-payment tools have nearly eliminated the need for manual invoice workarounds that once required custom Excel files sent to clients.
What Still Keeps Some Stations on the Sidelines
Even with the benefits becoming clearer, some stations still hesitate to modernize receivables. The concerns are familiar: our advertisers still prefer checks, our team doesn’t need another system, or we already send invoices by email. None of those objections are unusual. But none of them change the underlying reality that payment friction slows collections.
Offering digital payment options doesn’t mean forcing every advertiser to change overnight. It means making it easier for the ones who are ready to pay faster. And emailing an invoice, by itself, is not the same as creating a faster path to payment. If the invoice still must be printed, routed for approval, or followed by a separate payment request, the delay is still built into the process.
What leading stations are finding is that the shift reduces internal effort. Fewer manual handoffs. Fewer payment delays tied to missing information or disconnected systems. Fewer follow-up cycles between accounting, sales, and the advertiser. The result is a collections process that asks less of the team while producing cash faster.
The Bigger Shift: Receivables as a Competitive Advantage
For a long time, accounts receivable was treated as a back-office function that was something to manage, not something to optimize. That framing is changing.
Mastercard’s 2026 research put it plainly: in an uncertain business environment, financial control is becoming a measurable competitive advantage, not just an operational necessity. Stations with faster, more predictable cash flow have more flexibility to invest in content, to weather a slow advertiser month, to plan with confidence rather than react.
The payment infrastructure a station builds today shapes that flexibility. And with 55% of B2B payments now moving via ACH or card and only 8% of businesses still relying primarily on checks, the window for treating electronic payment adoption as optional is closing.
The stations that are ahead aren’t waiting to be pushed. They’re building the systems now, so summer and every season after it runs on their terms.
Sources: Ready Ratios / media industry DSO benchmarks; Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (electronic payment adoption cost study); Mastercard State of Commercial Card Acceptance research, as reported by PYMNTS (May 2026).
- Mastercard / PYMNTS (May 2026): https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2026/mastercard-pushes-virtual-cards-beyond-payables/
- Marketron PayNow: https://www.marketron.com/paynow
- Stax surcharging: https://staxpayments.com/blog/surcharging-program/
- Stax pricing: https://staxpayments.com/pricing/
- Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia study: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/digital-bill-payments-could-save-the-radio-industry-as-much-as-75-in-accounts-receivable-costs-223117101.html
