It's never just about Accounts Payable: The case for end-to-end P2P optimization

Yet regardless of industry, company size, and software, most AP teams face the same set of challenges: late payments, missed cash discounts, duplicate payments. On the surface, fixing AP may seem like a matter of fixing the process itself — but it actually requires resolving breakdowns along the entire Procure-to-Pay process (also known as Purchase-to-Pay, or P2P).

This is because errors and inefficiencies during purchasing and receiving trickle down, piling pressure on AP and creating costly reworks, delays, and friction. For businesses to truly optimize AP, they need to zoom out and fix the root causes of issues across the entire P2P puzzle — with a toolbox, not a tool.

In this blog, we’ll explore how Process Intelligence enables organizations to address AP challenges by optimizing the entire P2P process — not just AP in isolation — by getting system-wide visibility and taking intelligent action.

Accounts Payable challenges start before the invoice

Missing purchase orders, data inaccuracies, payment errors. These slip-ups might sound minor on their own, but for AP teams they create reconciliation nightmares, slow down processing, and put vendor relationships at risk. AP sits at the end of the Procure-to-Pay process and carries the fallout from any earlier missteps.

Let’s take a closer look at how upstream issues affect AP and why improving AP requires end-to-end visibility and coordination across the entire P2P process.

1. Purchase requisition creation

Free-text requisitions, where requesters type in needs instead of choosing from a catalog, force buyers to manually interpret details, find vendors, and confirm pricing. These create delays downstream by slowing down purchasing time, introduce confusion and mistakes from the get-go, and waste chances to take advantage of negotiated discounts.

2. Purchase order creation A missing purchase order — or one that's vague, unauthorized, or contains even a minor error like an incorrect billing address — can throw the entire invoice payment process off course, forcing AP teams to manually process exceptions, chase approvals, and resolve mismatches.

3. Receiving goods and services

AP teams can’t do their job if no one’s sure what actually got delivered or when. Receiving records with missing or inaccurate items throw a wrench in AP’s ability to verify invoices against delivery, resulting in a backlog of unresolved transactions that bog down operations.

4. Invoice processing From missing data to duplicate entries, manual invoice processing invites errors that slow down workflows and cost money. Duplicate invoices can also slip through Enterprise Resource System (ERP) safeguards, putting pressure on AP teams to detect and correct them before they escalate into costly mistakes.

It’s not hard to see how issues upstream in the P2P chain can build up, leaving AP to untangle a complicated web of missteps just to keep the business moving. For AP to avoid discrepancies, delays, overpayments, and added inefficiencies downstream, the P2P process needs to be running smoothly end-to-end.

How Process Intelligence enables seamless P2P optimization

One of the most common obstacles to operational excellence is a lack of process visibility. This is especially true as business processes — and the teams, touchpoints, and stakeholders behind them — expand and grow more complex. Procurement teams might have a wealth of KPIs and data at their disposal, but they often struggle to diagnose what’s behind sub-optimal results and tackle the true causes of process inefficiencies. This is where Process Intelligence (PI) comes in.

Using a combination of process mining, AI, and business context, Process Intelligence creates a system-agnostic digital twin of business workflows. Providing teams with objective visibility and a shared understanding of how tasks and processes are running across their P2P processes, it empowers people to pinpoint exactly where siloes, bottlenecks, and poor collaboration are having the most impact — and take corrective action to create value.

PI is a full toolbox for transforming P2P, providing the visibility, diagnostics, and levers needed to drive improvements that can be felt across the entire business. Let’s look at how PI drives smarter decision-making and targeted actions at each stage of the P2P journey — from requisition to invoice — by connecting the dots between process data, system behavior, and business outcomes.

1. Purchase requisition creation

PI streamlines P2P from the start by providing teams with visibility into the vendors, teams, and individuals behind free-text requisitions, along with the ability to automatically match and reroute them to catalog items.

2. Purchase order creation

Because PI is built with over a decade of process improvement knowledge and AI, it not only flags erroneous POs in real-time, but gives intelligent recommendations on how to correct them. Less errors, less costs down the line.

3. Receiving goods and services

With PI, businesses can operate with better insight into suppliers’ true performance and use intelligent recommendations to correct lead times.

4. Invoice processing

PI automatically spots and smooths out the issues that stop purchase orders and invoices matching before they make a negative impact. Using AI-driven intelligent matching and real-time ERP integration, the Celonis Duplicate Invoice Checker App also detects and manages duplicate invoices, minimizing lengthy audit and recovery efforts.

On top of these optimizations, Celonis innovations like AgentC — a suite of AI agent tools, integrations, and partnerships enabling our community to develop AI assistants in the leading AI agent platforms — can further accelerate P2P outcomes. Within AgentC, agents get the process data and business context they need to understand how the business runs and how to make it run better.

A global consumer goods company, for example, built an AI agent in a partner platform to extract payment terms from PDF contracts, compare them to terms in their master data, PO, and invoices, and then recommend actions to Accounts Payable clerks to address inconsistencies.

Bringing clarity, control, and continuous improvement to the P2P process, PI provides the all-in-one toolbox teams need to transform fragmented workflows into a streamlined value engine.