How Many Times Should AP Make the Same Decision?

An invoice arrives from a vendor your company uses every month. The details have been captured, but someone still needs to choose the account, assign the department, and check whether any costs belong to a project.

So they open last month’s invoice to see how it was handled.

It’s a small task. Repeat it across dozens of invoices, and it becomes a regular part of someone’s day.

For AP teams, this is one reason invoice processing still takes time, even after reducing paper and manual data entry. Getting the information into the system is only part of the work. Someone still has to decide where the expense belongs.

The invoice is captured. Now what?

Capturing an invoice means reading information such as the vendor, invoice number, date, and amount. Coding it means deciding how to record the...