Cloud based accounts payable is now the default rather than a choice, which makes it worth being precise about what moving to it actually changes. Three things genuinely do: approvals can happen anywhere, updates arrive without a project, and the document and the record live in the same place by default. Two things that are often claimed do not: it does not make the process better on its own, and it does not remove the exceptions. This page separates the real changes from the marketing ones and sets out the questions worth asking about where your data lives and how you would get it back, which are the ones that matter and are asked least.
What genuinely changes
Approvers can act from anywhere, which addresses the commonest cause of an invoice missing the cut-off. Updates arrive continuously rather than as upgrade projects. And documents sit with records rather than on a server somebody maintains.
What does not change
The exception rate, the quality of your purchase discipline, and whether approvers respond. 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, $10.75 an invoice and $51,609.60 a year. and the exception portion of that survives any hosting decision.
The questions worth asking
Where the data is held, how you export it and in what completeness, what happens at the end of the contract, and what the vendor's obligations are if you store supplier personal data. Those four are asked far less often than feature questions and matter considerably more.
Questions people ask about cloud based accounts payable
Is cloud less secure?
For most small businesses it is more secure than a server they maintain themselves, which is an uncomfortable but usually accurate observation. The risks shift to access control and configuration.
What if the vendor goes out of business?
That is what the export question is for. A system you can leave with your records intact is a manageable risk; one you cannot is not.
Does cloud mean automatic backups?
Usually of their infrastructure, which is not the same as you being able to recover your data in a form you can use. Test an export rather than assuming.