Your accounts payable process is either working for your organization or working against it. There’s not much middle ground.
When AP runs well, you have real visibility over cash outflows, reliable supplier relationships, and a team that can spend its time on things that matter. When it doesn’t, you’re drowning in exceptions, chasing approvals, and reconciling discrepancies that should never have happened in the first place.
Most AP teams sit somewhere between those two scenarios. They’ve made progress, but they still hit walls. Invoices pile up at month-end. Approvals stall when key people are unavailable. Suppliers call because they don’t know when they’ll be paid.
The steps below are designed to help you move the needle on each of those problems. We’ve ordered them roughly from foundational to higher impact, because process improvements compound. Getting the basics right first makes everything else more effective.
Start with your current state
Before changing your process, you need to understand it clearly. That sounds obvious, but many AP improvement initiatives stall because teams jump to solutions without a real picture of their current workflows.
Map your invoice-to-payment cycle in detail. Where do invoices enter the system? Who touches them, and when? At what points do exceptions most often occur? What’s your average processing time?
Research from Ardent Partners consistently puts the average invoice processing time for organizations without automation at around 17 days. High performers can do it in under four. If your cycle time sits closer to the former, that gap is worth understanding before you decide what to fix.
1. Standardize how invoices come in
One of the most straightforward ways to reduce exceptions is to control how invoices arrive. If you’re accepting invoices by email, paper, supplier portal, and EDI simultaneously, each channel introduces its own failure modes. Suppliers send to the wrong address. Invoices get stuck in inboxes. Data comes in different formats and quality levels.
A centralized intake process, where all invoices flow through a defined set of channels, reduces that variability immediately. It also makes automation far more effective, because you’re processing predictable inputs rather than whatever happens to arrive.
If you work with a large supplier base, you can’t enforce this overnight. Prioritize high-volume suppliers first, then expand.
2. Fix data capture before it causes downstream problems
Errors introduced at invoice capture are expensive to fix later. They cause matching failures, approval delays, and duplicate payment risks. Various industry sources estimate that manual data entry errors affect between 1% and 5% of invoices. Over thousands of invoices a year, that’s substantial rework.
OCR and AI-based invoice capture tools have improved considerably in recent years. They don’t eliminate exceptions entirely, but they do reduce the volume of errors reaching your matching and approval workflows. If your current capture process is fully manual, this is one of the highest-leverage changes available to you.
3. Apply three-way matching consistently
Three-way matching (comparing the purchase order, goods receipt, and invoice) remains the most reliable control for catching unauthorized or inaccurate charges before payment. Many organizations apply it selectively, and even those that do often run the process manually.
The problem with manual matching isn’t just the time it takes. Manual matching tends to be inconsistent. Reviewers apply different levels of scrutiny, particularly under time pressure at month-end. Automated matching enforces the same rules on every transaction.
If your organization doesn’t yet have systematic three-way matching in place, start there. If you do have it, audit how it’s being applied. Are tolerances clearly defined? Are exceptions being investigated properly, or waved through when approvals run slow?
4. Get approval workflows out of email
Approval bottlenecks are among the most common causes of late payments and strained supplier relationships. When approvals live in email, you get lost messages, delayed responses, and no visibility into where an invoice sits in the queue.
A few things help here. First, define your approval matrix clearly: who approves what, at which threshold, and with what delegation rules for absences. Document those rules, apply them consistently, and review them periodically. Approval chains have a tendency to grow over time without anyone questioning whether the added steps are still necessary.
Second, move approvals into a system where you have real visibility. That could be a dedicated AP platform, or an integration with tools your approvers already use. Serrala’s AP automation solutions include Microsoft Teams integration, which lets approvers review and sign off on invoices without logging into a separate platform. For teams where AP approval is a secondary task for many people, that kind of accessibility makes a measurable difference to cycle times.
5. Set a target for touchless processing
“Touchless” invoice processing means invoices that move from receipt to payment without human intervention. It’s a realistic goal for a significant share of most organizations’ invoice volume.
Most teams that measure this find a substantial portion of their invoices are perfectly standard and require no exception handling. Those invoices don’t need human attention. Setting a touchless processing rate target forces you to identify where human intervention is being added unnecessarily, versus where it genuinely adds value.
High-performing AP teams typically achieve touchless rates above 70%. If you’re not tracking this metric today, start. It’s one of the clearest indicators of overall process maturity. According to data from Ardent Partners’ State of ePayables report, best-in-class AP teams process invoices in 3.1 days at a cost of around $2.78 per invoice, compared to 17.4 days and $12.88 for the rest.
6. Build a supplier portal
Inbound queries from suppliers asking about payment status, invoice receipt confirmation, and disputes consume a disproportionate amount of AP team time. Much of it doesn’t require human judgment; it just requires access to information.
A self-service supplier portal lets vendors track invoice status, submit invoices in compliant formats, and update their own payment details without contacting your team directly. This reduces the administrative burden on AP and tends to improve supplier satisfaction.
If you’re building a portal, the supplier experience matters. Portals that are difficult to use don’t get used, and you end up back where you started. Design for clarity and simplicity.
7. Prepare for e-invoicing compliance now, not later
E-invoicing mandates are expanding. France’s structured e-invoicing requirements are in progress, Germany’s are rolling out through 2028, and other EU member states are following with their own timelines. If your organization operates across multiple countries, the compliance picture is becoming increasingly complex.
The risk of treating this as something to address later is that you implement compliant processes reactively, under time pressure, without the opportunity to integrate them cleanly into existing AP workflows.
Organizations that plan proactively tend to find the transition more manageable. They can align technical requirements with existing automation investments and avoid running parallel processes. Serrala’s e-invoicing automation solution handles mandate-compliant e-invoices across 60-plus countries, which is relevant if you’re managing invoicing across European or other regulated markets.
8. Capture early payment discounts more deliberately
Early payment discounts are frequently available but rarely captured at scale. The reason is usually process speed: by the time an invoice has been received, matched, approved, and queued for payment, the discount window has closed.
Automation addresses this by compressing cycle time. When you can process invoices in days rather than weeks, dynamic discounting becomes a real lever for treasury, not just something that happens by chance.
According to Ardent Partners data, only around 32% of businesses prioritize early payment to capture discounts, though many more report that discounts are available from their suppliers. If your current process makes early payment difficult, the root cause is almost always a slow approval or matching workflow, not a lack of discounts to capture.
9. Make fraud prevention part of the process, not an afterthought
The 2026 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey found that 80% of organizations experienced attempted or actual payments fraud in the prior year. AP is a primary target, because it’s where legitimate payment instructions are processed and vendor contact is frequent.
Business email compromise (BEC) attacks on AP teams have grown more convincing, and AI is making them harder to detect. The controls that help most are: consistent verification procedures for payment detail changes, dual authorization for new or modified vendor bank accounts, and a clear escalation path when something looks wrong.
Automation helps here, but not by replacing human judgment. The value is in creating consistent rules applied to every transaction, rather than relying on individual staff to spot anomalies under deadline pressure.
10. Track the metrics that actually tell you something
Only 9% of AP teams describe their approach to measuring performance as extremely effective, according to data from the Institute of Finance and Management. That’s a striking gap, given how much useful data most AP systems generate.
The metrics worth tracking consistently: cost per invoice processed, average cycle time from receipt to payment, invoice exception rate, touchless processing rate, and on-time payment rate. Those five numbers give you a clear picture of process efficiency, cost, and quality.
What many teams track instead are total invoice volumes and headcount ratios. Those describe capacity. They don’t tell you where your process is breaking down. If your KPIs aren’t diagnosing performance, the metrics themselves may need to change.
11. Align AP and treasury on payment timing
AP and treasury tend to operate separately, but they share a direct interest in working capital. Payment timing decisions, specifically when to pay and to whom, affect cash flow. Paying too early drains liquidity unnecessarily. Paying too late damages supplier relationships and creates late payment liability.
Getting these two functions coordinated on payment strategy requires some deliberate effort: aligning on dynamic discounting programs, payment term negotiations with key suppliers, and how AP’s payment schedule feeds into cash flow forecasting. It’s not a technical problem. It’s an organizational one.
If treasury has low visibility into AP’s payment pipeline, that’s worth addressing. The data sharing tools exist; the question is whether the processes are in place to act on them. For teams looking to connect AP and treasury more tightly, Serrala’s finance automation platform is built to support that kind of cross-functional visibility.
12. Automate in stages, not all at once
AP automation projects fail when teams try to do everything simultaneously. The technology usually isn’t the problem; change management is. Teams managing existing workloads while implementing a new system often see adoption problems, workarounds, and a gradual drift back to old habits.
A better approach is to start with high-volume, low-complexity invoices, get those flowing cleanly through an automated process, and then expand scope. Build confidence with quick wins before tackling the harder cases.
If you haven’t looked at what AI-based AP tools can do recently, it’s worth revisiting. The capabilities have changed considerably. Our article on AI use cases in accounts payable covers what organizations are doing today and what’s becoming realistic in the near term, beyond the headline use cases that get most of the attention.
Where to start in AP automation
AP process improvement doesn’t have a fixed end point. It’s an ongoing effort to reduce friction, improve data quality, and give your team the information they need to make good decisions quickly.
If you’re just starting, focus on intake standardization, data capture quality, and approval workflows. Those changes don’t require major technology investment, and they produce results that make subsequent automation projects far more effective.
If you’re further along and looking for more significant efficiency gains, the benchmarks on touchless processing rates and cost per invoice give you a clear picture of what high-performing teams achieve. The gap between where most organizations are today and where the top performers are is real, and it’s mostly explained by process discipline and automation maturity rather than technology alone.
For teams running SAP or looking for cloud-native AP processing, Serrala’s accounts payable solutions address these challenges across the full invoice-to-payment cycle. If you’d like to explore what that looks like in practice, you can request a demo here.
