Follow five practical steps—from mapping current workflows to measuring touchless processing rates—to build an efficient, scalable accounts payable operation.
Patrick Evenden
Head of Thought Leadership, EMEA
Workday
The following steps outline how to automate your accounts payable process in a way that’s scalable, reliable and aligned with the broader goals of the finance organisation:
1. Assess your current AP process
2. Build a connected digital workflow
3. Apply AI to high-value AP tasks
4. Connect AP across the finance organisation
5. Measure, optimise and scale
6. Communicate changes and drive adoption
The goal is a single, connected workflow where invoices can move from receipt to payment processing with minimal human touch – while still giving finance full control and transparency over your financial operations.
Before introducing new technology, understand what you’re actually trying to automate. Work with accounts payable, procurement, treasury and business stakeholders to map how invoices move through your organisation – from submission and data capture to approvals, payments and reconciliation.
Don’t limit yourself to the documented process. Identify where employees manually enter financial data, chase approvals, resolve duplicate invoices or work around disconnected systems. These friction points often represent the biggest opportunities for automation.
This current-state assessment becomes the foundation for every automation decision that follows. Identifying and reducing errors at this stage is the fastest way to enable the benefits of AP automation further down the line.
AI is only as effective as the process it’s built on. Start by standardising how invoices enter your organisation through supplier portals, centralised AP inboxes, electronic data interchange (EDI) integrations or other digital channels.
From there, use technologies like optical character recognition (OCR) and AI-powered document processing to capture invoice data, validate key fields and route invoices through standardised approval workflows based on your policies.
Replacing email chains and manual data entry with a single connected workflow improves visibility while creating the consistent data AI needs to perform effectively.
With automated invoice processing, AP teams spend less time on admin and more on work that requires expertise.
With a connected workflow in place, AI can begin eliminating much of the repetitive work that slows AP teams down. Use AI to extract invoice data, recommend general ledger (GL) coding, match invoices against purchase orders and receipts, identify duplicate invoices, intelligently route approvals and prioritise exceptions for human review.
With intelligently automated invoice processing, AP teams can spend less time on administrative work and more on work that requires nuanced judgment and expertise, such as complex exceptions, strengthening supplier relationships and supporting strategic financial decisions.
Accounts payable shouldn’t operate in isolation. Connect AP with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, procurement, treasury and payment systems so invoice data flows seamlessly across finance.
Real-time visibility into payment status, outstanding liabilities, supplier activity and cash requirements improves forecasting, strengthens working capital management, and gives finance leaders a more complete picture of organisational spend. It also creates a better experience for suppliers by providing greater transparency into invoice and payment status.
Successful AP automation is an ongoing process, not a one-time implementation. Track metrics such as invoice cycle time, touchless processing rates, exception volumes, on-time payment performance, manual intervention rates and early payment discount capture to understand where automation is creating value.
Use those insights to refine workflows, improve AI performance, eliminate recurring bottlenecks and strengthen upstream processes. As invoice quality improves and manual effort declines, accounts payable evolves from a transactional function into a strategic source of financial insight.
Even the best AP automation initiative will fall short if the people using it don’t understand how processes are changing or why those changes matter. As new workflows, AI capabilities and approval processes are introduced, communicate early and often with finance leaders, business approvers, procurement teams, suppliers and other stakeholders.
Provide training on new responsibilities, establish clear expectations around AI-assisted workflows, and share performance metrics that demonstrate progress over time. Regular updates on improvements like faster processing times, higher touchless rates, fewer exceptions and better visibility help reinforce adoption and build confidence in the new process.
Successful AP automation isn’t just measured by the technology that’s implemented, but by how consistently people embrace and use it across the organisation.
Successful AP automation isn’t just measured by the technology that’s implemented, but by how consistently people use it.
As organisations invest in AP automation solutions and AI in finance, many discover that technology alone doesn’t solve the underlying accounts payable challenges. Workday research found that nearly 40% of AI productivity gains are lost to rework because AI is introduced into workflows not designed to support it.
Accounts payable frequently reflects this challenge. Over time, new approval paths are added after audit findings, separate workflows emerge for new business units or regions, and reporting is layered on to meet new business needs.
While each change solves a specific problem, together they can create fragmented workflows, disconnected accounting systems and inconsistent data that limit the value AI can deliver.
Successful AP automation starts with redesigning the entire invoice lifecycle, from invoice intake and data capture to approvals, payments and reporting. Every stage should work together as part of a connected AP process that gives AI the context, governance and high-quality data that it needs to deliver meaningful results.
Accounts payable automation isn’t a one-time technology project. It’s an ongoing effort to build a finance operation that’s more connected, intelligent and resilient. Organisations that see the greatest long-term value don’t simply automate existing tasks; they continually refine the processes, data and governance that support them.
As AI capabilities evolve, a connected accounts payable workflow creates the foundation to adopt new technologies with confidence while maintaining financial control, compliance and visibility.
By redesigning the invoice lifecycle, embedding AI where it delivers meaningful value and continuously improving the process over time, finance teams can become strategic partners to the business. The result isn’t solely faster invoice processing, but better financial insight, stronger decision-making and an accounts payable function that’s built to scale.
Finance leaders are facing increased expectations from both internal and external stakeholders. Download this report to uncover the top five reasons CFOs are moving to Workday.
Report
A gap between effort and impact is the real ROI problem. Discover the solution.