Is Your AP Process Ready for What’s Next? Five Questions Every Finance Leader Should Ask
If your accounts payable process works well today, that’s great, but it doesn’t mean things should stay the same forever. As your organization evolves, it’s worth considering if the technology and processes you use today will continue to support you tomorrow. Do they give your team the flexibility, visibility, and oversight it needs as your organization grows?
AP teams are often very good at making an imperfect process work, but that can make it easy to overlook opportunities to work more efficiently, reduce risk, and strengthen controls.
The five questions below can help you assess how well your current approach to AP is serving the business and where potential changes to your process, technology, or both could make a meaningful difference.
1. Where does AP create the most friction for the business?
To answer this question, start outside the AP department.
An invoice may pass through several hands before payment, including employees who submit invoices, managers who approve them, finance staff who review them, and vendors waiting to be paid.
Where do those people regularly have to stop, follow up, search for information, or ask someone else what happens next?
Maybe an approver has to search through their emails for an invoice, or your CFO has to keep asking AP for a payment status update. Perhaps a simple vendor question requires someone to pull together information from several scattered places.
None of this is a necessary or beneficial part of your AP process. It’s just what you do. If everyday AP tasks take more effort than they should, they may point to areas where new technology or process shifts could have a positive impact on your business.
2. Which parts of your current process have earned a place in the future?
If you’re planning or considering an ERP transition--like moving from Dynamics GP to Business Central--this question is especially relevant. But even if you’re staying where you are, documenting your process can help you identify where there is room for improvement, and what to carry forward if you decide to move to a new system. We talk more about that here.
Some steps in your process exist for good reason. They may support an important internal control, address a business requirement, or reflect how your organization operates. Other steps may exist because an older system required them or because someone created a workaround years ago.
As you map the current process, ask why each major step exists. What purpose does it serve? What would happen if it went away? Is there an easier way to accomplish the same thing?
Pay particular attention when the answer is something like, “That’s just how we’ve always done it.”
The goal of these questions is to find out not just what processes can be carried forward but which ones are worth keeping and which may be best left behind.
3. How quickly can you answer a payment question?
Imagine a department leader has a question about an important invoice. How many steps would it take to give a reliable answer?
A useful way to evaluate visibility is to follow one invoice from receipt through payment and note every place someone must go to understand its status.
For some accounts payable teams, checking on payment status can be a source of stress. It’s not that the information doesn’t exist, but finding the answer requires checking the ERP system, looking through emails, opening a spreadsheet, or asking another employee (or sometimes several of these steps at once). A simple question should not turn your AP team into detectives.
Ask yourself: Could someone with the right authority understand where this payment stands without relying on the person who normally manages it?
If not, the issue may be bigger than reporting. It may point to information that is too fragmented across your process.
4. How much of your AP process lives in people's heads?
Every AP team develops institutional knowledge. The longer team members work within a process, the more they learn its nuances, including the exceptions, extra steps, and judgement calls that may never make it into written procedures.
While individual experience is valuable, it’s problematic if the process cannot function reliably without their presence.
An effective way to test this is to think beyond written procedures.
If an experienced AP employee were unavailable for two weeks, could another team member confidently complete the next payment cycle? Would they know how to handle exceptions? Could they determine what needs attention without reconstructing the process from emails, notes, and past experience?
When you’re thinking about preparing AP for the future, take time to consider how to turn more of that valuable individual knowledge into a repeatable process.
We’re not looking to replace individual team members. Human judgement will always matter, and experienced employees will continue to play an important role in handling unusual situations and making decisions.
Your opportunity is to make routine work less dependent on memory so that expertise can be used where it matters most.
5. What happens when the business asks AP to do more?
Growth does not always arrive as a dramatic increase in revenue or headcount. It can look like:
Another legal entity
A new location
More vendors
A higher invoice volume
New approvers
A change in payment methods
An acquisition
Each one adds something else for AP to manage.
Consider a simple growth stress test: Could your team absorb a 25% increase in invoice volume without adding staff?
Use the 25% as a quick way to gauge how closely workload tracks with transaction volume.
If 25% more invoices require roughly 25% more manual effort, the current process may have limited room to grow. If the team could handle the increase without a significant change in workload, the process may already be well positioned for additional volume.
Now, go beyond invoice count. What happens if the company adds another entity? What if approval responsibilities change? What if an acquisition introduces another finance team or ERP environment?
The purpose of these questions is not to predict exactly what your business will look like three years from now, but it’s helpful to understand how much flexibility your AP team has to deal with business changes.
Turning your AP assessment into action
How you answered the five questions can help you understand what changes may be worth exploring. You may find that some issues can be addressed by clarifying responsibilities or redesigning a process. Others may reveal that your current technology is creating limitations that process changes alone won’t solve.
Either way, let the business need lead the decision. Once you know where the friction, risk, or capacity constraints are, you can evaluate the options that address them.
Change is a chance to make a deliberate choice
A technology project can easily become an exercise in recreating what already exists, but doing that is a missed opportunity.
When you are moving to Business Central, evaluating AP automation, or reconsidering how your organization manages payments, take the time to understand the process underneath the technology and why things happen the way they do.
Think about what might be coming next for accounts payable. Then talk to the people doing the work every day. Where have they found workarounds? Why do certain steps happen the way they do? What do they know that no one else does?
Those conversations can reveal a lot about how the work really gets done. With a clearer picture, you can make more informed decisions about what deserves to stay, what needs to change, and what you’re ready to leave behind.
