Advice about the best accounts payable practices is usually arranged by category, which is easy to read and hard to act on, because it does not tell you what to do first. This page arranges the same material as a week. Everything here can be done by a small team inside five working days, none of it needs a purchase, and it is ordered so that each step makes the next one easier. It is not a transformation programme; it is the sequence we would follow ourselves in a business where payables had drifted and the close was running late, which is the ordinary situation rather than an unusual one.
Monday: one arrival address and a duplicate check
Redirect every supplier to one address and tell the team that anything arriving elsewhere gets forwarded there. Add a uniqueness check on supplier and invoice number at entry. Both are done in an afternoon and both stop new problems being created while you fix the old ones.
Midweek: the two rules that unstick invoices
Write down who can approve an invoice with no purchase order, and up to what value. Publish the approver map with named alternates. These two paragraphs address the commonest reasons an invoice stops moving, and neither needs anybody's permission to write.
Before the cut-off: publish what is unapproved
Send the list of unapproved invoices to the people holding them, three working days before the cut-off. This is the single highest-return action in payables and it costs one email. On the worked example on this site, $48,000 current, $21,000 at thirty days, $9,500 at sixty and $4,200 beyond is $82,700 owed, 42% of it overdue, with days payable outstanding of 30.26.
Questions people ask about best accounts payable practices
What if the team resists?
None of this asks anybody to work differently except approvers, and they are asked to act on a list rather than search an inbox, which is easier rather than harder.
What comes after the week?
Measure the route with the free worksheet on this site, then decide about capture and matching from your own figures rather than from a vendor's.
Will this fix a late close on its own?
It addresses the payables half. If the close is late for other reasons, price it with the free close worksheet and you will see where the hours actually are.