StreamPath is live. It has been in production since 15 July at a leading Argentine business holding — manufacturing, import and distribution of consumer electronics and home appliances, with diversified operations in food, consumer goods and energy — carrying the accounts receivable files that move every day between its ERP, its banks and its partner companies. And what changed most is something simple: you can now see, as it happens, that every file arrived where it had to arrive.
There is a moment when a product stops being a product. It gets installed, configured, handed a real process, and becomes part of somebody else's operation. StreamPath reached that moment.
And in an operation that shows up fast: if the workflow fails, collections go unapplied and customers who already paid are still on the debtor list. It runs every day, on the group's real collections.
When something breaks, the problem is almost never that the file did not move. It is that nobody found out in time.
The ask was not about moving files
Early every day, the ERP drops the day's collection files into a folder: debtor registers, direct debit sign-ups and cancellations, debit instructions. They have to reach the bank in an exact format and inside a time window.
The bank answers with files of its own: collection settlements, rejected debits, statements. Each one goes back to the ERP to be applied against the account of the customer who paid. On the other side there are partner companies — franchises, wholesalers, payment processors — reporting their own collections, and since the group operates across several industries at once, every route has its own format, its own protocol and its own window. It is the background work nobody watches while it works, and it is how the money comes in.
All of that was already working: the group collected every day and each bank received what it had to receive. What was missing was watching it while it happened. Knowing whether a file had gone out, at what time and what the bank answered was a separate errand, and in a process that runs every day the delay has a price: if a settlement does not come in, the day's reconciliation does not balance, and the first to notice tends to be the customer.
That was the ask. Not moving the files differently — being able to see the movement at the moment it happens.
The route of a settlement file
The bank leaves the collection settlement on its SFTP. A scheduler goes and gets it, StreamPath copies it into the automated reconciliation software and, once reconciled, it lands in the ERP, applied against the account of the customer who paid.
None of this travels through an open port: the systems inside are reached by a lightweight agent that runs on the network and dials outward.
If the bank adds a field to the layout, the file does not slip through: validation stops it, the run is flagged and the alert goes out. It gets fixed, that file is retried, and the day carries on.
What has run so far
Since 15 July, when the first workflow went into production:
- 6,027
- runs executed
- 2,461
- files transferred
- 3.2 GB
- total volume
- 11
- workflows in production
- 10
- connections across ERP, banks and partner companies
- 98.9%
- successful runs
The 68 failed runs and the 7 cancelled ones are the interesting part. Each one names its file, its step and its reason, so each was dealt with on its own. Not one of them ended in a collection day rebuilt by hand.
Knowing instead of assuming
A file that went out correctly and a file nobody looked at look very much alike. The difference turns up two days later.
Every file carries its own log: what was read, which transformation was applied, where it was written, how long it took and what the other end answered. Runs stream live, as they happen.
That turns questions somebody used to go hunting for into a ten-second lookup:
Did Tuesday's debit file go out?
At what time, and how many records did it hold?
Did yesterday's settlement come in, and why is one missing?
Who changed the destination folder, and when?
That last one is answered by the configuration trail, which nobody can edit afterwards: when the auditors arrive, the evidence already exists.
That is the point, and it is simpler than any feature list: the certainty that a file arrived where it had to arrive.
Every step stays on the record, and the team looks at the screen and knows how the day is going.
What the go-live left us
Two things we learned watching the product work in somebody else's house.
The problem is almost never moving the file. It is knowing what happened. The value showed up on the runs screen before it showed up in the transfer engine.
The format is law, and it changes without warning. A new field in the bank layout ruins the day. Validations, retries and alerts are the difference between a file stopped in time and a reconciliation that does not balance.
A product changes the moment it starts running in somebody else's house. Decisions that looked obvious get argued over, and the ones that looked like details turn out to be the center of the thing. Here the center was the simplest thing of all: that the process works, and that you can see that it worked.
StreamPath has been running since 15 July. We will keep writing about what comes next.
Marcos Reynoso
Founder – The41
https://the41.io