Ask any finance leader about cash application and watch the eye twitch. Matching incoming payments to open invoices sounds simple until checks, credit cards, detail-free ACH transfers, missing remittances, multi-invoice payments, and short-pays turn every day into a reconciliation puzzle. HOH Water Technology, a Chicagoland industrial water treatment company running on Datacor for more than a decade, was about to hire another full-time person just to post cash, until Datacor’s AI team proposed automating the workflow inside the ERP instead.
As HOH grew, one employee’s entire full-time job became posting cash, and she had hit capacity. The obvious next move was to add another person in 2026 to keep up.
“Some transactions are credit cards, some are checks, some come in as bank ACH with no details. Some customers send remittances and some don’t. Some pay multiple invoices with a single payment, and some short-pay invoices, so the dollar amounts don’t even line up when you’re looking in the ERP. Everything is like a scavenger hunt.”
— Mark Wittig
Here is the trap: manual cash application scales linearly with volume, so the only lever a growing business seems to have is more people. Every new customer and every new payment method adds exceptions, and exceptions are what turn a routine task into a time sink. For a finance team, that is budget spent on reconciliation instead of on analysis, forecasting, or cash strategy.
“We were looking at increasing headcount, and that’s when Datacor said, "I think we can teach AI to, if not do this process, help speed up this workflow, and shorten the time." So they had a vision I did not have.”
— Mark Wittig
When companies tackle a problem like this, the usual options are expensive outside consultants or risky custom builds. HOH had a third option. Because Datacor already holds HOH’s data and already knows its process flows, its AI team could move on the problem without the cost, ambiguity, and risk of a typical consulting engagement.
“There are consultants who will charge you any amount of money you can imagine, to have Datacor bring the expertise through the AI team, and they already have all of our data and know our process flows, it was such a huge win and a huge relief that we could make this kind of progress without taking these big, expensive risks.”
— Mark Wittig
For a finance leader, the ERP is not just software; it is the system of record the whole business depends on. Wittig’s takeaway was about confidence: nobody knows exactly what an ERP will look like in 20 years, so having a partner that is actively investing in AI de-risks that future.
“None of us know what an ERP is going to look like in 20 years with AI. But having a partner you can trust, that you know is making these investments, brings so much more confidence. From the finance seat, the downside risk of an ERP that can’t do what it needs to do is so huge.”
— Mark Wittig