Introducing Alti, Financial Intelligence Put to Work for Service Businesses

Many service businesses, owners, and operations leads might already have the judgment needed to turn financial information into good business decisions. They know their clients and their people better than any report does, but what they lack is the time to pull the numbers together and to act on the information they have.

The Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) defines it as “the use of financial knowledge, business understanding and judgment to make better decisions” in its financial intelligence glossary.

Alti, the financial intelligence inside Alternative Payments, makes it all easier. It connects PSA (Professional Services Automation), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), Accounting, and Analytics to understand your business, your team, and your books. Alti works across your financial data and provides you with a chat Q&A interface to make it easy for you to speed up your billing cycle, get informative reports about your business, see how you stack up against your peers, and ultimately make more informed decisions about your business. Oh, and Alti also does the legwork for you, like following up on unpaid invoices.

Starting with financial intelligence: what is it?

Financial intelligence is the skill of connecting numbers to decisions. Reading financial statements is the starting point, and from there, it's about what your finances signal and deciding what to do about it.

In a business, the focus is financial health and profitability, and the financial questions you need answers to are fairly practical: Is cash flow strong enough to hire? Which clients make money, and which only look busy? Is a new contract a good deal once you count the hours it will take? What return will a new tool or service line bring?

According to AFP, people develop financial intelligence through focused learning and real-world practice. Nobody is born with it. To develop financial intelligence, finance professionals build foundational skills by working on actual decisions with colleagues in different departments, then reflecting on how those decisions turned out. Over time, financial intelligence compounds: repeated work on forecasts, variance reviews, or planning strengthens judgment and pattern recognition.

Financial intelligence vs. financial literacy and financial analysis

Financial literacy and accounting literacy are the foundation. AFP calls it “the foundational ability of an individual to read and understand financial statements.” Think of the income statement and the balance sheet. Financial intelligence applies that basic financial knowledge to real-world decisions.

Financial literacy alone doesn’t prepare you for changing conditions. It gives you the foundational skills to read what last quarter’s numbers say, but not how to respond when conditions shift. It won’t tell you what to do when a large client starts paying late, or when labor costs rise faster than your contracts.

Between the two, you'll find financial analysis, which is how data is interpreted to identify trends and support decisions...basically, turning raw numbers into financial insights and actionable insights. Here’s how the three compare:

Meet Alti, the financial intelligence inside Alternative Payments

Alternative Payments is an AI-powered financial operations platform for service businesses. It connects with the PSA, ERP, accounting, and business management systems teams already use.

Accounts Receivable automates invoicing, payments, collections, and reconciliation. Analytics shows client profitability, utilization, and cash flow in custom dashboards, and Benchmarking, an add-on within Analytics, compares your performance with industry peers. Accounts Payable brings vendor bills, approvals, and outgoing payments into the same platform.

Alti is the financial intelligence across that platform.

Answers from your live business data

Ask, and Alti answers from your live account data, combining customers, invoices, payments, and emails. A question like “Whose on-time payment rate has slipped compared with their history?” comes back as a table in seconds. Because Alti remembers the conversation, you can narrow an answer with a follow-up instead of starting over.

Actions that require your approval

Alti can tag customers, send reminders, set up Auto-Pay rules, charge an invoice, or refund a payment. Before anything changes, you see a confirmation card with the exact details. For a charge, that means the invoice, the customer, the amount, and the payment method...and nothing happens until you approve it.

Agents for multi-step jobs

Agents take on a whole job and stop for your approval along the way. The Collections Agent works your overdue book, while the Failed Payment Recovery Agent handles payments that didn’t go through. When a record from your PSA or accounting system doesn’t come through, anyone on your team can ask, and the Integration Agent explains what happened.

Reports and dashboards that keep running

Any answer can become a Routine Report that runs daily, weekly, or monthly and lands in your inbox. A Routine Workflow saves a multi-step job you worked on in a chat with Alti, so you can run it again with one click.

Custom dashboards start with a simple description. Then, Alti proposes the KPIs for each item, and you can sort through the ones that matter to you.

What a month with Alti looks like

Here’s how those pieces fit into an ordinary month.

Monday morning: the week in review

A weekly Routine Report can get Alti to provide important info that matters on a Monday morning: “Summarize my week: aging, what I collected compared with last week, my top overdue customers, and cards about to expire.” By default, it runs at 8:00 AM each week, with every report including numbers, a plain-language list of what changed, charts, and tables you can download.

Your week starts with knowing where to look, keeping you informed, and putting an end to any manual work.

Midweek: working the overdue book and cash flow

Say the report shows a few accounts slipping. The Collections Agent groups every overdue account into aging buckets and shows the money at stake in each. Before a follow-up email is sent, you see the exact subject line and wording, so you can tweak it and approve.

The agent also finds your chronic late payers. By default, those are customers with at least three invoices paid late in the last 90 days who are currently overdue, and the agent offers to enroll them in Auto-Pay. Last, it lists those who never responded or whose email bounced, so you can decide what happens next.

What do you do when a payment card fails?

Failed payments can happen for a variety of reasons, such as a declined card, insufficient funds, an expired card, or an ACH return. With your approval, Alti's Failed Payment Recovery Agent excludes those customers from Auto-Pay, so the platform stops re-charging a card it already knows is expired or not working. Then, with your approval, it emails the customer to update their payment details.

It will also highlight the customers whose payments are working again after failing, so you can put them back on Auto-Pay.

Analytics gives you profit by client, and how you compare

With Analytics, a monthly client profitability report can ask, “Which clients’ margins moved most this month, and which are below my average?” A client hours report flags clients whose recorded hours dropped compared with their usual hours.

That’s the evidence you need when you're going into a renewal conversation, since revenue only means something next to what it really costs to deliver. Add a custom dashboard for the KPIs you watch, and with Benchmarking, compare them with industry peers. For deeper information on this, check out our guide to explaining why your margins changed.

Alti keeps you in control

Financial intelligence only helps if you can trust it with your account, and Alti has rules built in to ensure it's always working for you:

• Every action stops on a confirmation card, and a decline is final. Alti won’t retry it on its own.
• Alti follows your dashboard access level. Everyone can ask questions, Read-Only users can’t make changes, and sensitive actions like charging invoices or emailing customers need an Administrator or Sub-Admin.
• Alti only works with your own account’s data, and it doesn’t connect to outside services or plugins to read or act on it.
• Routine Reports can only read, so they can’t charge a card or email a customer.
• Every confirmed action is logged with who approved it.

Alti is a helper, not a complete replacement for your judgment. For a complete checklist about evaluating financial intelligence, read: how to evaluate an AI financial assistant.

Using financial intelligence like Alti in your service business

Financial intelligence helps decision makers connect daily work to financial performance. Service businesses sell time and expertise, so the numbers that matter also connect revenue to the effort behind it and show where the organization creates value. A few of the most useful things to track are:

• Cash flow: Including the timing of cash movements, a profitable month can still leave you short if clients pay 60 days late.
• Client profitability: Automated financial analytics can identify unprofitable clients and underpriced contracts by comparing what each client pays with the labor and service costs of supporting them.
• Effective hourly rate: the revenue you earn for each hour your team spends serving a client.
• Utilization: the share of your team’s available hours that goes to client work.
• Days to collect: how long it takes to turn an invoice into cash.

Large corporations have the resources for finance teams that track these numbers before every big decision. Many private companies in the service world don’t, so the owner ends up doing the analysis at night. That is, if it gets done at all.

Using it for pricing and investment strategy

Good numbers give nonfinancial managers more confidence in pricing and investment choices during everyday work. With them, you can reprice a renewal for a client whose support costs have grown, or decide whether the team can take on a new project, and stronger financial intelligence helps bring everyday work closer to long-term business decisions. You can also evaluate and create an investment strategy for next year, whether that means hiring another technician or creating a new service line.

Without those numbers, the same decisions are made purely on instinct, or to support the client who's the squeakiest wheel in the bunch.

Why financial intelligence is hard to build in a service business

The best-run firms work from tighter numbers

In its 2026 profitability report, Service Leadership found that “Best-in-class IT solution providers achieved 19%+ adjusted EBITDA profitability for the sixth consecutive year.”

Peter Kujawa, EVP and GM of Service Leadership and IT Nation at ConnectWise, said “a sharper focus on efficiency and AI automation” is helping the best-run businesses expand service gross margin.

We call the distance between those firms and the rest of the market the profitability gap. That gap is widening amid rising labor costs, tool sprawl, and unbillable hours. Closing it starts with seeing where the money goes.

The answers are in different systems

Most service businesses run their work through a PSA (professional services automation), keep their books clean and organized in accounting software like QuickBooks, and accept online invoice payments through another platform. Each part of their tech stack is important to their business for one reason or another, but the workflow between them is often stitched together and disconnected.

To see which clients are profitable, someone has to integrate data from time entries and invoices manually, which takes hours, so it probably doesn't happen very often, if it happens at all. Those disconnected systems slow analysis and make it harder to keep accelerating reporting cycles.

Money you’ve already earned is waiting in receivables

Late payments make it worse. In its 2026 survey of North American businesses, Atradius found that payment delays “impact, on average, 23% of B2B receivables.” That’s revenue you’ve earned and can’t use or invest yet. Receivables count as an asset on the balance sheet, but they don’t cover payroll until they’re collected.

AI is still early for smaller firms

Most businesses haven’t brought AI into their workdays yet. The U.S. Census Bureau found that from December 2025 to May 2026, “overall AI usage hovered between 17% and 20%.” Use grew among firms with at least 20 employees, but it “didn’t change significantly among firms with fewer than 20 employees.”

For a smaller service business, that’s a chance to move early...and fast, if the tool works with your real data.

Where AI fits into financial intelligence

AI is taking over a lot of the gathering and reporting that used to be done by a finance team, even if it was just a team of one. AFP notes that generative AI, automation tools, and performance management systems now consolidate information, generate forecasts, identify patterns, and accelerate reporting cycles, “Generating information is no longer the bottleneck; knowing what to do with it is.” Faster forecasting and scenario work also support informed decision-making by freeing teams to interpret results instead of just compiling them.

In practice, AI and machine learning are already streamlining financial planning and forecasting in tools built for that work. Other AI tools automate workflows and monitor KPIs, so nobody has to remember to run a report. A system that reads every client the same way can even reduce bias in financial decision-making, because the call no longer rests on the loudest client or the latest bad week.

From software you operate to intelligence you direct

For years, getting an answer meant knowing which screen to open and which report to build. Acting on that answer was still your job.

Alternative Payments built Alti to change that order. You ask a question or describe what you need. Alti answers from your live business data, suggests next steps, and carries out the actions once you approve them.

“The most powerful interactions in finance are shifting to agentic workflows,” said Baxter Lanius, founder and CEO of Alternative Payments. “The companies that accelerate will focus 100% of their time on clients, pricing, and growth, and the rest of their business will be automated.”

What teams already see with Alternative Payments

Across the more than 1,000 companies that use Alternative Payments, teams have cut days to collect by 42%, and they save more than five hours a week per accounts receivable operator, as reported in our launch announcement. Alti builds on those results.

That matters, because administrative efficiency in billing and payments affects how much profit actually reaches the owners.

How to get started with financial intelligence

Start with a question you already ask yourself or a team member, like “Who owes us money, and what’s overdue?” Look at the answer, and decide whether you’d want it every Monday. If you would, save it as a Routine Report.

Next, give one job to an agent. You can run just its first stage, which finds and groups the accounts without changing anything, and decide from there. Then move on to the questions behind your bigger decisions, like which clients are most profitable and how you compare with peers. For ideas, see these questions your dashboard can’t answer.

Alternative Payments connects with PSAs including ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA, and SuperOps, and with accounting systems including QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, Xero, NetSuite, Sage Intacct, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Zoho Books, and FreshBooks. Analytics currently works with ConnectWise Manage, HaloPSA, or Autotask paired with QuickBooks Online.

Alti is now widely available.

Financial intelligence FAQ

What is financial intelligence in simple terms?

It’s the ability to understand what your numbers mean and use them to make better decisions. Financial literacy covers the terms and statements, and financial intelligence gives decision-makers the confidence to understand what those numbers mean and decide what to do next.

What does financial intelligence software do?

This kind of software connects to your financial and operational data, answers questions about it, and helps you act on the answers. Alti, for example, answers from live account data and carries out approved actions like payment reminders and Auto-Pay enrollment.

Is Alti a chatbot?

Alti opens in a chat panel, but it isn’t just a chatbot. It works only with your Alternative Payments account’s data, and it can take actions in your account once you approve them. Our guide to AI finance assistants explains the difference.

Can Alti make changes without my approval?

No. Every action, including each one inside an agent’s job or a Routine Workflow, waits on a confirmation card until you approve it.

Bring your questions to an Alti demo

The fastest way to judge financial intelligence is to see it answer the questions you actually ask. Bring the questions you’ve been meaning to answer to a demo, and we’ll show you how Alti handles questions like them. Book a demo.

Prefer to watch first? Baxter Lanius is demoing Alti live in a webinar on November 12, 2026.

Sources: AFP (2026), Service Leadership (June 2026), Atradius (September 2026), U.S. Census Bureau (May 2026), our launch announcement (October 2026), and our help center.

Reviewed by Daniel Reiter, Creative Director at Alternative Payments, on November 1, 2026.