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2025’s top accounts payable trends

5 min read
Published on 08-01-2025

What’s in store for finance’s most rapidly transforming function in the new year

Accounts payable has long been the finance function quickest to embrace digitization – and that’s only going to continue to be the case in the coming year. 

In 2025, businesses that embrace new AP innovations will find themselves well-positioned to optimize working capital, ensure compliance, foster collaboration, and harness advanced technologies for seamless operations. We’re going to see automation not only making AP processes easier, but making AP a real player in strategic business transformation too.

Here's the most important accounts payable trends you should expect to see – and start working to capitalize on – over the next twelve months.

1. Shifting focus to working capital management.

AP departments are playing a more active role in optimizing working capital by embracing tools and strategies that enable better visibility and control over spend. These include taking advantage of dynamic discounting solutions that helping buyers generate higher returns on surplus cash while simultaneously supporting supplier liquidity. Organizations leveraging these programs can improve supplier relationships and free up cash to reinvest in growth initiatives.

Real-time analytics tools continue to provide AP teams with enhanced insights into cash flow, supplier performance, and payment trends. With real-time information organizations can balance pending payments with available liquidity to meet their obligations without sacrificing growth opportunities.

This shift towards a working capital mindset creates an opportunity for organizations to adopt an integrated approach to finance and accounting. By aligning AP with AR and treasury functions, businesses can optimize cash conversion cycles, reduce borrowing costs, and unlock capital trapped in inefficient processes.

2. Compliance and the e-invoicing revolution

Compliance never gets simpler – and it’s about to get a lot more complex in 2025 as governments worldwide continue their rollouts of new mandates for e-invoicing. These mandates require businesses to submit electronic invoices directly to tax authorities, and they’re reshaping the way organizations manage core AP functions as a result.

Countries such as Brazil, Mexico, China, and many EU nations have implemented (or are about to implement) e-invoicing mandates to reduce tax fraud and improve transparency. To stay compliant, AP departments must therefore invest in robust and compliant e-invoicing solutions fit for country-specific requirements. For multinational companies in particular, staying compliant across multiple jurisdictions requires careful planning and technology investment, as no two e-invoicing mandates are alike.

These new compliance requirements shouldn’t be viewed as a burden – they are an opportunity to fundamentally streamline your AP and payment operations. E-invoicing provides the catalyst organizations need to consolidate ERP and financial systems, retire legacy processes, and reorient finance and accounting around new and secure standards. Advanced compliance platforms enable automated checks against local regulations, ensuring that AP teams meet requirements such as VAT reporting, e-signature validation, and invoice archiving and retention.

Incorporating compliance-as-a-service (CaaS) features, which are continuously kept up-to-date also allows AP departments to focus on core operations without worrying about falling behind on e-invoicing mandates.

3. Improving collaboration between AP, finance, and the rest of the business

AP operations have traditionally been siloed, labor intensive, and prone to inefficiencies, miscommunication, and missed opportunities. In 2025, a key trend in accounts payable will be using automation and integration to foster better collaboration between AP and other business units, suppliers, and regulators.

As you’d expect, closer relationships with procurement are a top priority for many – reflecting the complexities of the “procure to pay” or “P2P” cycle. Working closely with procurement to structure purchase orders (POs) so they are easier to match to incoming invoices and increasing the overall number of PO-based invoices received for processing and payment will significantly improve the P2P cycle time. 

Supplier self-service portals are also continuing to gain traction. These portals improve transparency and reduce the workload on AP teams because they allow suppliers to upload invoices, track payment status, and resolve disputes independently, fostering stronger relationships and reducing friction. (And they’ll likely continue to evolve and improve to facilitate simpler e-invoice compliance).

As compliance requirements grow, collaboration with regulatory authorities is critical. Automated reporting tools enable organizations to communicate directly with tax authorities, reducing the risk of audits or penalties – and in many jurisdictions, they’re actually being made compulsory as part of the rollout of e-invoicing mandates. 

4. Putting AI to work for next-level automation and data quality

AI is transforming accounts payable by intelligently automating repetitive tasks, enhancing data accuracy, and ensuring secure, cost-effective processes. In 2025, AI will continue to be a game-changer for AP operations, making some of the most onerous manual work associated with legacy payables workflows a thing of the past.

AI-powered solutions streamline the invoice approval process by automatically routing invoices to the appropriate approvers based on predefined rules. Machine learning algorithms can flag anomalies or discrepancies for human review, reducing errors and speeding up approval cycles.

Beyond this, data entry errors and duplicate payments are long-standing challenges in AP. AI-driven tools use intelligent document processing (IDP), optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) to extract invoice data with a high degree of accuracy, thus minimizing manual intervention required to process and pay invoices.

AI is also allowing organizations to implement intelligent document management approaches that securely store and index invoices for easy retrieval. These systems optimize data retention costs by categorizing documents based on their retention requirements or business importance, ensuring that critical records are accessible when and where they are needed.

And finally, AI tools are proving invaluable for fraud detection thanks to their capacity to quickly identify anomalies and other patterns in invoice and payment data to identify suspicious activities, such as vendor impersonation or overpayments, in real-time.

5. Extending AP capabilities through integration with other enterprise systems

The maturity of cloud-based solutions and simpler integration across ERP systems and other critical enterprise platforms are already allowing organizations to extend AP capabilities far beyond simple invoice processing.

The shift to the cloud – driven by the need for cost-effective, flexible, and scalable AP solutions – is increasingly allowing teams to manage AP processes from anywhere. With Cloud solutions, AP departments can quickly modernize and standardize AP processes across a diverse global enterprise and enable real-time collaboration without the need to support costly and complex on-premises infrastructure. Through seamless integration with ERP and procurement systems, AP can operate as part of a unified financial ecosystem, eliminating information silos and improving end-to-end process efficiency.

And, as cyber threats continue to rise, AP departments are increasingly dependent on cloud for advanced security protocols. Professionally managed cloud platforms meet the latest data security standards and have enterprise-class back up and disaster recovery features that will safeguard sensitive financial data and prevent unauthorized access.

6. Evolving AP beyond AP

Saving the best till last: the most advanced AP automations systems are now expanding their capabilities to support broader business objectives that fuel the strategic power of the whole finance department to improve decision making and help organizations embrace new opportunities. For instance, some platforms now offer analytics dashboards that provide CFOs with actionable insights into spend patterns, supplier performance, and cost-saving opportunities in real time – making AP a real partner in overall business goal setting and performance.

How can Serrala help you embrace these changes?

As the pace of change accelerates, AP leaders must stay informed about emerging accounts payable trends and invest in the right technologies and processes to thrive in this dynamic landscape. By embracing these trends, organizations can turn their AP departments into strategic assets that contribute to overall business success.

Serrala AP automation solutions are designed to create a coherent, end-to-end ecosystem for your AP and payment processes that simplifies your accounting workflows and allows for full working capital optimization. To learn more about how we can help you revolutionize your approach to accounts payable – and how our solutions can streamline and automate every part of the process for greater efficiency, transparency, and decision velocity, check out our resource pages here or click here to book a demo.  
 

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