4 Metrics the Best AP Departments are Measuring

What makes an AP department best-in-class? Each year, Ardent Partners puts together their “Metrics that Matter” report on the metrics that organizations use to measure success in their AP departments that make them top-performing.

For those organizations that have embraced AP automation, there are some statistics that Ardent Partners has highlighted that make certain adopters “best-in-class.”

• Invoice Processing Costs: According to Ardent Partners, the average cost per invoice in 2019 was $11.57, which included the cost of labor, overhead and technology. This dollar amount had only gone down by about 4 percent in a year. Ardent Partners found that the 20 percent of companies with the lowest average invoice processing costs and the shortest average invoice times are considered the best of the best in accounts payable.
• Electronic Payments: It can take about 25 days to process a single invoice using manual processes and procedures. This means receiving invoices in the mail, copying, scanning, manually entering data, passing physical invoices to approvers and then filing those invoices in physical filing cabinets. However, Ardent Partners reports that automation can reduce invoice processing time down to 3-5 days. The top-performing AP departments use automation to improve invoice processing time, resulting in a processing time that is three times faster for a single invoice than companies without automation.
• Invoice Exception Rates: What does your company do when it encounters a problem with an invoice? These exceptions are often major hang-ups for companies not using automation technology due to the time it takes to find and fix the problem and the number of people who often need to be involved in the manual process. However, best-in-class AP departments have used automation to combat this, resulting in a 57 percent lower exception rate than other enterprises.
• Touchless Processing: When an invoice is received, approved and processed manually, efficiency greatly declines. But when companies use touchless processing, like MetaViewer’s Touchless Invoice Processing, they experience a rate of touchless invoices that are 3.4 times higher than companies that do not automate. 

Today’s AP departments are utilizing automation at a higher rate than ever, and it’s paying off! With the help of automation technology, companies can overcome barriers, like limited visibility and effectiveness, and become more streamlined and more efficient than ever before.