Lists of accounts payable processing best practices tend to be long, undifferentiated and drawn from businesses with a payables department. Read as a checklist by a team of two they produce guilt rather than improvement, because twenty practices with no order of merit is not advice. This page ranks them for a business closing one set of books, by what each one actually returns for the effort it takes. The ranking is opinionated and the reasoning is given, so you can disagree with it knowingly rather than accept a list because it was published.
First: publish what is unapproved as the cut-off approaches
Costs nothing, changes the month immediately. The pile of unapproved invoices at cut-off is what becomes accruals and surprises, and most of it clears when the people holding it can see they are the constraint.
Second: write down the no-order rule and the approver map
Two short paragraphs that remove the two commonest reasons an invoice stops moving. Cheaper than any software and usually more effective than the first year of it. Between them they cover the two commonest reasons an invoice stops moving, and both fit in a paragraph each rather than in a manual nobody opens.
Third: capture, then match, then automate the routine
In that order, and only once the route is written down. On the worked example on this site, 400 invoices at three touches of six minutes with a 12% exception rate is 134.4 hours a month, $4,300.80 at a $32 loaded rate and $10.75 an invoice. Automation removes touches from the invoices that behave; it does not remove exceptions, which are judgements. Anything promising otherwise is selling the happy path.
Questions people ask about accounts payable processing best practices
What about early payment discounts?
Worth taking when your cost of cash says so, and a poor reason to reorganise payables on its own. Capture the discount terms so the decision can be made, then decide it deliberately rather than by whoever runs the batch.
Should we centralise payables?
In a single-entity business the question rarely arises. Where it does, centralising helps consistency and hurts local knowledge, and the trade-off is about how unusual your spend is.
Is a supplier portal a best practice?
For a business with hundreds of suppliers, often. For one with thirty, it moves work to suppliers who will not do it and creates a channel nobody watches.