The accounts payable process is the route an invoice takes from arriving to being paid and posted. Described in a textbook it is six tidy steps. Run in a small finance team it is a shared inbox, a person who knows which supplier goes to which approver, and a set of exceptions that live in someone's head until they are on leave. Both descriptions are true, and the gap between them is where the time goes. This page sets out the six steps, says which of them actually consume the effort in a team of one to fifteen, and points at the arithmetic you need before deciding whether to change anything, because a process nobody has priced is a process nobody can improve on purpose.
The six steps, and the two that cost
Receive, code, match, approve, post, pay. Receiving and posting are quick. Coding is quick once the rules are settled. What consumes the month is matching, where the invoice disagrees with the order or the receipt, and approval, where the invoice sits in somebody's inbox while the cut-off approaches. Any improvement that does not touch those two is decoration.
Where a small team loses the hours
Not in the steps themselves but in the handovers between them: the chase, the re-explanation, the invoice that comes back because it was coded to the wrong cost centre. Counting touches rather than steps is what makes this visible. On the worked example on this site, 400 invoices touched three times at six minutes, with 12% going wrong and taking eighteen minutes more, is 134.4 hours a month: $4,300.80 at a $32 loaded rate, $10.75 an invoice.
Price it before you change it
The free approval worksheet on this site turns your own invoice count, touches, minutes and exception rate into hours and an annual cost. That figure is what any software quote, any extra approver and any process change should be held against, and it takes about two minutes to produce.
Questions people ask about accounts payable process
What is the difference between the accounts payable process and the procure-to-pay process?
Procure-to-pay starts earlier, at the request to buy something, and includes the purchase order. Accounts payable usually starts when the invoice arrives. The distinction matters because a great many payables problems are actually procurement problems arriving late, and no amount of payables discipline fixes an order nobody approved.
How many steps should our process have?
As few as leave the invoice checked. The number to reduce is touches, not steps: an invoice that passes cleanly through six well-defined steps costs less than one that bounces twice between three.
Does this change at month end?
The steps do not; the deadline does. Everything unapproved at the cut-off becomes an accrual or a surprise, which is why this hub treats payables as part of the close rather than as a neighbouring job.