This means practically every other function interacts with, feeds into, or depends on AP teams. Optimization in such an interconnected department will naturally cascade through the rest of the organization – making business-wide operations run more efficiently and everyone’s jobs easier.
AP departments can therefore be change makers who actively drive innovation, transformation, and improvement. It’s an ability that’s increasingly important to 47% of Finance and Shared Services teams according to The Process Optimization Report 2025: Finance Edition.
So there’s a lot riding on AP processes. They can provide hiding places for all sorts of value opportunities, minimizing cash leakage from:
- Late payment – affecting 55% of all B2B invoiced sales in the US alone
- Duplicate payments – estimated to be around 1.5% of an organization's total outgoing cash flow (which can easily add up in large enterprises)
- Payment errors (such as incorrect billing addresses) – occurring in 39% of invoices, according to one estimate
- Missed early payment discount opportunities – with 80% of supplier discounts going unclaimed
To understand where these issues come from, we need to iron out exactly what the Accounts Payable process looks like. Look out for our tips along the way for making the Accounts Payable process work.