Paperless accounts payable best practices are easy to list and hard to make stick, because the failure mode is not dramatic. Nothing breaks. A month gets busy, somebody prints an invoice to get it approved quickly, and six weeks later there is a parallel paper process nobody decided on. The practices that matter are therefore the ones that remove the reason to reach for paper, not the ones that forbid it. This page ranks them for a team of one to fifteen, and is explicit about the two that determine whether the change survives its first busy month.
First: make approving easier than printing
This is the one that decides it. If approving on a phone takes fifteen seconds, nobody prints. If it requires a login somebody does not have, they will print, and no policy will stop them. Test this as an approver before anything else.
Second: make retrieval fast enough to trust
Personal paper copies exist because people do not believe they will find the digital one. Filing against the supplier and the invoice, so retrieval takes seconds, removes the reason. Trust is the actual mechanism here.
Then: scan on arrival, keep one archive, write down retention
Scanning at the front rather than the end stops a backlog forming. One archive rather than two stops the question of which is authoritative. A written retention policy stops everything being kept forever by default, which is what happens when nobody decides.
Questions people ask about paperless accounts payable best practices
Should we ban printing?
Banning it treats a symptom. Every team we have seen succeed made the digital route faster instead, and printing stopped on its own.
How do we handle approvers who will not adopt it?
Usually by fixing the interface rather than the person. Where it is genuinely a preference, a delegate who approves on their behalf, recorded, is better than a paper exception.
What is the most common regret?
Running paper and digital in parallel indefinitely, which doubles the work and leaves nobody sure which is the record.