Accounts payable processing is usually described in invoices a month, which is the wrong unit. Two businesses handling four hundred invoices can spend wildly different amounts of time on them, because the effort is not in the invoice, it is in the number of times a person picks it up. A clean invoice against a clean order might be touched twice. One with no order, a price difference and an approver on leave might be touched seven times over three weeks. Counting touches instead of invoices is the single most useful thing a small finance team can do before deciding whether to buy software, hire, or change the route, and this page is how to do it.
Count touches for two weeks, not invoices
Every time somebody opens, codes, chases, approves, queries or posts an invoice is a touch. Two weeks of honest counting is enough to see the shape, and the counting itself usually surfaces steps nobody had mentioned.
Separate the routine from the exceptional
The two populations behave differently and want different fixes. Routine invoices respond to capture and matching; exceptions respond to clearer rules and a named owner. 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. where exceptions are 14.4 of those hours.
Convert to money before deciding anything
Hours are easy to dismiss and money is not. The free approval worksheet turns your counts and a loaded hourly rate into a monthly and annual figure, which is what any quote or hiring case should be argued against.
Questions people ask about accounts payable processing
What is a reasonable cost per invoice?
Not a number we will quote you, because published benchmarks are drawn from businesses whose touches, rates and supplier mix are not yours. The useful comparison is your own figure before and after a change.
Should we process invoices daily or in batches?
Little and often for capture and coding, batched for payment. Daily capture keeps the unapproved pile small as the cut-off approaches; daily payment removes the review point where a second person looks.
Does volume justify software on its own?
No. A high-volume, low-exception population is cheap to run manually; a low-volume, high-exception one can be expensive. The exception rate matters more than the count.