ARO — Accounts Receivable & Outreach Automation Platform

ARO solves a common small/medium business problem: unpaid customer invoices (accounts receivable) that take too much manual effort to track and follow up on.

The platform has two connected parts:

aro-backend — the engine. It stores companies, invoices, customers, payments, and runs all the business logic and automated jobs.

aro-portal — the website. It is what the business owner (and their team) logs into to manage everything, and it is also what the customer sees when they receive a payment link.

How it works, end to end:

A company signs up and connects its Stripe account (so it can accept payments and get paid out).

The company uploads an invoice — either by filling a form or by uploading a scanned/PDF invoice, which the system reads automatically using AWS Textract (OCR) to pull out the invoice number, amount, dates, and line items.

Each invoice is linked to a "debtor" (the customer who owes money).

The company can build "workflows" — automatic step-by-step follow-up sequences (e.g., "send a reminder email after 3 days, send an SMS after 7 days, create a phone-call task after 14 days, stop automatically once paid").

A background scheduler runs these workflows every day without anyone needing to click anything.

The customer receives a secure link (the "payment portal") where they can see the invoice and pay by card, without needing to create an account.

Once paid, Stripe notifies the backend (via webhook), the invoice is marked paid, and the money is transferred to the company.

The company can see everything on a dashboard: how much is outstanding, how overdue it is (aging report), and trends over time.

There is also a wallet/credit/referral system — companies earn or spend credits (used for things like OCR processing or premium usage), and can refer other companies to earn rewards.

The client is a Europe-based B2B financial services provider specializing in debt collection and Accounts Receivable management. They help businesses recover outstanding and overdue payments while focusing on maintaining strong customer relationships. Their services include Debt Collection, A/R Management, Training, Consultancy, and Secondment, with support for businesses operating across international markets.

1. Accurate OCR Extraction: Challenge: Invoice formats vary wildly across different businesses, making standard regex or simple parsing error-prone.
2. Solution: Integrated AWS Textract to leverage machine learning for document analysis, mapping extracted fields (total, dates, line items) reliably regardless of the invoice layout.

Reliable Automated Scheduling:

1. Challenge: Ensuring the daily scheduler scales as more companies create complex, multi-step workflows, without sending duplicate reminders.
2. Solution: Built a robust cron-based engine with state-tracking in PostgreSQL, marking workflow steps as "completed" atomically to guarantee idempotency.

Multi-Tenant Security and Payment Flow:

1. Challenge: Securely managing funds for multiple independent businesses without co-mingling money.
2. Solution: Utilized Stripe Connect to spin up individual connected accounts for businesses, allowing ARO to facilitate the payment directly to the merchant while optionally collecting a platform fee.

Seamless Local-to-Cloud Deployment:

1. Challenge: Keeping parity between local development and the cloud environment to avoid "it works on my machine" bugs.
2. Solution: Containerized both frontend and backend using Docker, orchestrated locally via Docker Compose, and deployed exactly the same images to AWS ECS via GitHub Actions.

A REST API backend (Node.js/Express/TypeScript) that exposes all functionality (auth, invoices, debtors, workflows, payments, reports) as documented, versioned endpoints, with interactive API docs (Swagger).

A single-page web application (React/TypeScript) that consumes this API — one app serves both the business dashboard (logged-in users) and the public-facing payment page (for customers/debtors), using role-based routing.

PostgreSQL as the single source of truth, accessed through an ORM (Sequelize) with version-controlled database migrations, so the database schema is set up and updated automatically when the app starts.

Automated OCR pipeline: uploaded invoice files are stored in AWS S3, then analyzed by AWS Textract to extract structured data automatically instead of manual data entry.

Automated outreach engine: a scheduled job (cron-based) walks through active workflows daily and triggers email/SMS reminders or internal tasks, and stops automatically once an invoice is paid.

Secure payments: Stripe Connect is used so each company gets its own connected account; customers pay via Stripe Checkout; a webhook keeps invoice status and payouts in sync in real time.

Authentication & access control: JWT-based login with password hashing (bcrypt), plus role-based access control so only the right company/user can see the right data.

All backend features are covered by automated tests (Vitest), and the frontend has both unit tests and full browser-based end-to-end tests (Playwright) that simulate a real user creating invoices, uploading documents, and completing flows.

The whole system is containerized (Docker) and deployed automatically: every push to the main branch builds a new container image and redeploys it to the cloud without manual steps (CI/CD).

Node.js, Express.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Sequelize, React 19, Vite, Redux Toolkit, React Router, Tailwind CSS, Radix UI, AWS S3, AWS Textract, Stripe & Stripe Connect, Twilio, Nodemailer, JWT, bcrypt, Docker, GitHub Actions, AWS ECS/ECR, Vitest, Playwright.

• Reduced Manual Effort: Replaced manual data entry and repetitive follow-up emails, saving business owners hours of administrative work each week.
• Faster Payment Cycles: Automated, schedule-based reminders combined with an instant card-payment link reduced the average days sales outstanding (DSO).
• Scalable Architecture: The Dockerized Node.js + React setup on AWS ECS allows the platform to easily handle sudden spikes in background jobs and OCR processing.
• Reliable Data Sync: Real-time Stripe webhooks mean the invoice dashboard is always 100% accurate, removing the need for manual bank reconciliation.

The ARO platform effectively solves the Accounts Receivable headache for small and medium businesses by leveraging cloud AI (AWS Textract) for data entry, a robust automation engine for outreach, and modern FinTech (Stripe) for seamless payments. By providing a secure, multi-tenant architecture, ARO allows businesses to focus on their core operations while ensuring their cash flow remains steady and predictable.