Accounts payable (AP) rarely breaks all at once. It gets expensive through workarounds.
A finance team may have an ERP system at the center of accounting, but the daily work of paying suppliers often happens around it. Invoice capture sits in one tool, while payment execution sits in another. Supplier communication moves through email, and reconciliations rely on exports, uploads, and spreadsheets.
The process still functions, but every manual step adds cost, delay, and operational drag.
That is the hidden cost of AP workflows outside ERP systems: the accumulation of re-keying data, managing exceptions, chasing suppliers, printing checks, uploading bank files, correcting errors, and maintaining separate systems that were supposed to make finance faster.
Manual AP’s Real Price Tag
Ardent Partners’ AP Metrics that Matter in 2025 puts the average cost to process an invoice at $9.40. For organizations outside the best-in-class group, that cost rises to $12.88. Best-in-class AP teams, by contrast, process invoices for $2.78.
For a company processing 1,500 invoices a month, that gap becomes costly quickly. At $12.88 per invoice, annual processing cost reaches about $232,000. At $2.78, the same volume costs roughly $50,000. That difference does not include the harder-to-measure cost of delayed approvals, supplier inquiries, missed discounts, or finance staff spending time on low-value administrative work.
Processing time tells the same story. Ardent reports best-in-class AP teams process invoices in 3.1 days, while other organizations take 17.4 days. That delay affects working capital, supplier relationships, payment timing, and the ability to capture early-payment discounts.
Why AP Leaves the ERP
Steve Tackett, EVP of Operations at Priority Commerce, described the pattern in a recent conversation with ERP Today.
“Show me an AP department that doesn’t have employees manually importing, exporting files, performing manual reconciliations, re-keying invoices,” Tackett said. “Large and middle-market companies are often using ERP systems that are really strong on accounting, but weak on payments.”
That weakness creates a familiar architecture. The ERP system records the financial outcome, but invoice capture, supplier communication, payment optimization, card programs, ACH, real-time payments, and remittance workflows may sit outside it. Each decision can make sense in isolation. Together, they create complexity.
M&A adds another layer. Acquired companies bring different ERP systems, bank relationships, supplier files, and payment habits. Integration programs may get most of the way there, then stop short. Tackett said many companies complete the first few releases of an implementation and “maybe get 75% to 90% of the way there, but don’t get all the way.” The remaining manual work often becomes permanent.
The Supplier Enablement Factor
Tackett said many ERP providers are good at evaluating technology and APIs, but struggle with what happens after the integration is built. “The name of the game really is to ‘electronify’ and automate payments to make the whole thing more efficient,” he said. “Technology plays some role in that, but the real driver behind it is supplier enablement teams.”
Suppliers have to be convinced to accept more efficient payment methods. Email campaigns can help, but many suppliers ignore generic messages. Phone calls, trusted contacts, clear expectations, and practical education about payment timing and cost often matter more than another portal invitation.
Tackett’s advice for ERP and payment teams? Get references and listen to supplier enablement calls. The goal is to understand whether a partner can move suppliers toward ACH, real-time payments, and card without damaging the buyer-supplier relationship.
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The Manual Check Problem
Checks are another sign that AP modernization is incomplete.
Nacha’s summary of the 2025 AFP Digital Payments Survey says checks now account for 26% of B2B payments in the US and Canada, down from 81% in 2004. That decline is steep, but 26% still represents a large amount of manual work. Nacha also reports that ACH payments cost 26 to 50 cents, while issuing a check costs $2.01 to $4.00.
Those numbers do not capture every operational step. Checks can require printing, envelope stuffing, postage, positive pay file management, dual approvals, bank reconciliation, and supplier follow-up when mail is delayed or lost.
“As consumers, we’ve all moved past this and have ‘electronified’ our payments life,” Tackett said. “And yet on the other side, we have corporations where, ironically, the people who should be thinking about this most deeply still have suppliers where 40% to 50% of them still want to receive a check for payment.”
Moving suppliers away from checks requires more than mandate language. Buyers have to explain reliability, timing, cost, and payment visibility in ways that resonate with suppliers.
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Partial Automation Can Hide the Problem
The Institute of Finance & Operations Leadership’s 2025 AP Automation Trends report found that 63% of AP professionals spend more than 10 hours a week on invoice processing, up from 52% in 2024. The same report found 66% still manually key invoice data into their ERP or finance system, while 73% of teams are still not fully automated.
That partial-automation zone creates its own burden. Teams carry the license cost, integration effort, and vendor management overhead of automation, but still rely on people to bridge gaps between systems. Manual work does not disappear. It moves to exception queues, supplier follow-ups, reconciliation files, and month-end cleanup.
For CFOs, that means AP performance has to be measured beyond whether a tool has been deployed. The better questions are how many invoices move without touch, how much supplier communication still sits in email, how many payments still require manual file handling, and how often AP staff re-enter data that already exists somewhere else.
The path forward is not automation for its own sake. It is a connected AP operating model where ERP, invoice capture, payments, supplier enablement, reconciliation, reporting, and governance work together.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
Finance leaders should price the workaround, not just the software. AP costs accumulate through manual entry, delayed approvals, supplier inquiries, check handling, and reconciliation work that rarely appears as one budget line. CFOs need to calculate the real cost of invoices and payments before treating disconnected AP as a tolerable operating model.
AP modernization has to include supplier enablement. Electronic payments only scale when suppliers understand the timing, reliability, and cost benefits of moving away from checks. ERP and payment teams should evaluate partners on their ability to manage supplier conversations, not only on API connectivity or payment-rail coverage.
Partial automation can be just as costly as manual AP. Finance teams that deploy tools without eliminating re-keying, file uploads, check handling, supplier follow-ups, and reconciliation work often carry the cost of systems and manual labor at the same time. ERP leaders should measure AP modernization by touchless processing, electronic payment adoption, supplier conversion, and reconciliation effort, not by whether another tool has been added.
