Accounts payable workflow
- What approval costs a month
- $4,300.80
- Hours on routine handling
- 120
- Hours on exceptions
- 14.4
Every figure on this page is computed from the inputs entered, by the method stated below it. Monthendly publishes no benchmark close time, no industry average DPO and no accounting standard: the tasks, the minutes, the rate and the exception rate are yours, and the defaults are a worked example to replace with your own figures.
The accounts payable workflow is the route an invoice takes from arriving to being posted, and in most finance teams it is real but unwritten. An invoice lands in a shared inbox, someone opens it, someone codes it, someone decides who should approve it, that person is on leave, and three weeks later it turns up in the close as an accrual nobody expected. The workflow is not the problem; the fact that it lives in people's heads and an inbox is. What a workflow has to do is make the current state of every invoice visible: where it is, who has it, and what is stopping it. Everything else, including automation, is built on top of that.
Open the Accounts payable invoice approval process Free to use. No account, no card, no sign-up.
Arrive and code, once
The invoice lands against the supplier with the date it arrived, and is coded once rather than re-keyed by whoever picks it up. The point is not speed, it is that a second person can see what the first one did.
Match it, so approval is a decision and not a hunt
Two-way matching checks the invoice against the purchase order; three-way adds the receipt. Where they agree the approver is confirming, not investigating. Where they do not, the exception is flagged as an exception rather than quietly waiting.
Approve before the cut-off, and see what is blocking
Everything unapproved as the cut-off approaches is a list, not a surprise. That list is the difference between an accrual you chose and an accrual you discovered.
Accounts payable workflow: common questions
Is a workflow the same as automation? No, and the order matters. A workflow is knowing where every invoice is and who has it. Automation is doing some of the steps without a person. Automating a route nobody has written down usually just makes the confusion faster, which is why the first version of this should be visibility rather than rules.
How many touches should an invoice take? Fewer than it does now, and the honest way to find out is to count. The free approval worksheet on this site prices your current route: on its worked example, 400 invoices at three touches of six minutes plus a 12% exception rate is 134.4 hours a month.
What about invoices with no purchase order? They are the most common exception in a small finance team and the reason approval routes exist at all. Handle them as a named exception with an owner rather than as an ordinary invoice that happens to be stuck.
Will it do what you need for Accounts payable workflow?
Tell us how your close runs and we will tell you straight whether Monthendly Pro fits it today, whether it is coming, or whether you need a different product instead. A person reads these and replies.