“Before CBS, managing billing across our national accounts meant reconciling purchase orders and invoices across hundreds of locations with too many manual steps and too little visibility,” said Melissa Hyatt, director of strategic accounts at Johnstone Supply. “What CTS built gives us, and more importantly, gives our customers, something we didn’t have before: one system, complete accuracy, and real-time transparency from the moment a purchase order is issued to the moment payment clears.”

Hyatt said the platform has strengthened Johnstone Supply’s relationships with its most strategic national account partners. “For customers operating at this scale, billing accuracy and payment speed aren’t just operational details, they’re part of why they choose to stay,” she said.

The CBS was built for wholesale distributors and manufacturers managing complex national and regional account billing across multiple locations; the environments where manual processes create the most drag on cash flow and customer relationships. The cloud-enabled platform automates the entire procurement lifecycle from purchase order issuance through invoice generation, purchase order matching, pricing compliance, cash application and final payment disbursement via automated ACH.

Key capabilities include:

• Full EDI and XML automation across the procurement cycle, eliminating manual touchpoints from purchase order to payment.
• Real-time price verification against national and regional customer pricing contracts, ensuring billing accuracy at every transaction.
• A complete, auditable digital record of all transactions, giving finance and compliance teams instant access to the data they need.
• Automated cash application and ACH payment disbursement for both paper and electronic fund transfer remittances.
• A role-based online portal giving national account customers real-time access to purchase orders, invoices, accounts receivable balances and payment status.

“Distributors managing national accounts at scale are leaving significant money on the table every day with fragmented, manual billing operations and most of them know it,” said Nadeem Mazhar, chief executive officer of CTS. “Johnstone Supply had the vision to fix it at the enterprise level. What they’ve built with CBS across 450-plus locations is the model for what modern distribution billing looks like, and it’s replicable for any distributor or manufacturer dealing with the same complexity.”

Mazhar said demand for purpose-built billing automation among large distributors has accelerated as national account customers increasingly demand real-time financial visibility as a condition of their vendor relationships. “This is no longer a back-office conversation,” he said. “It’s a competitive differentiator.”