For all the technology that has changed accounting over the past decade, one part of accounts payable still looks surprisingly familiar.
An invoice shows up in an inbox. Maybe it comes directly from a vendor. Maybe a client forwards it. Either way, the email itself usually isn’t what creates the problem. What happens next does.
Someone has to open the attachment, figure out which client it belongs to, identify the vendor, check the invoice number and amount, determine how it should be coded, look for duplicates, enter the bill into QuickBooks, attach the source document, and decide whether anyone else needs to review it.
For one invoice, that is hardly a crisis. Do it hundreds of times across dozens of clients and it becomes a staffing problem. That is the part of AP we think deserves more attention.
The hidden workload behind every invoice
Accounting firms have spent years adopting better software, and much of it has made the profession more efficient. But new technology often comes with a familiar tradeoff: another place to log in, another queue to monitor, another process to teach the team, and sometimes another portal clients and vendors are expected to use correctly.
The software may be better. The workflow is not always simpler. For growing bookkeeping and CAS firms, that matters. Every new client brings more invoices, more vendors, more coding rules, more exceptions, and more small administrative decisions. If the amount of manual work grows at roughly the same rate as the client base, eventually growth means adding people.
There is nothing wrong with hiring. But repetitive invoice processing probably should not be the reason a firm has to do it.
Separate judgment from repetition
The opportunity is to separate the work that requires judgment from the work that does not. Accountants create real value when something looks unusual. A new vendor. An unexpected charge. A coding question. A missing purchase order. An expense that does not fit the client’s normal pattern.
Reading the same vendor name for the fiftieth time and typing it into another system is different. That is where automation becomes useful.
Much of the predictable work around an invoice can now happen before a person needs to get involved. Software can read the document, identify the vendor, capture the important fields, determine which entity it belongs to, check for duplicates, apply known coding patterns, and prepare the transaction for the accounting system.
The accountant is still there. The difference is that the accountant spends more time reviewing what is unusual instead of manually processing what is routine. That is a much more interesting value proposition than simply saving a few clicks.
Capacity is the real payoff
For a bookkeeping or CAS firm, the real payoff is capacity. If the same team can comfortably support more client work without sacrificing accuracy or responsiveness, automation starts to affect the economics of the firm.
The time that disappears from invoice entry can go somewhere more valuable: month-end close, reporting, cash-flow conversations, controls, advisory work, or simply getting back to clients faster. Clients are not paying their accounting firm because someone is exceptionally good at copying an invoice number from a PDF.
They are paying for confidence that the books are right and that somebody competent is paying attention. Technology should give firms more time for that work.
Better automation works with existing behavior
There is another piece of the equation that is easy to overlook: behavior. Email remains popular for invoice intake for a very simple reason. Everybody already knows how to use it.
A vendor does not need training to send an attachment. A client does not need a new login to forward a bill. A bookkeeper does not need to convince dozens of outside parties to change how they operate. Sometimes the smartest workflow improvement is not replacing the starting point. It is removing the unnecessary work that follows it.
That idea has shaped how we have approached building APStack. The goal is not to convince firms that invoices should arrive somewhere completely different. It is to automate more of what happens between the moment an invoice arrives and the moment clean information reaches the accounting system.
The broader principle applies well beyond any one product.
What AP should look like next
When firms evaluate automation, the question should not only be, “What can this software do?”
A better question might be:
- How much work will our people still have to do after we implement it?
That gets closer to the outcome that actually matters. The best technology does not necessarily create another destination for employees to spend their day. In many cases, it should make parts of the workflow almost disappear.
An invoice arrives, the routine information is understood, the predictable work is handled, and clean data reaches the accounting system. A person gets involved only when something actually requires judgment.
That is where we think AP is heading—not toward the disappearance of email or the removal of accountants, but toward eliminating the repetitive work that sits between the two. For growing accounting firms, that distinction matters. The inbox may remain the front door for a long time, but the manual work behind it does not have to remain with it.
===
Zach Stefansson and William Bussey are co-founders of APStack, an accounts payable automation platform built to reduce the repetitive work between invoice receipt and accounting software while allowing businesses and accounting firms to keep the workflows they already use. Learn more at apstack.ai.
Sign in to get access to this free resource, and all of our whitepapers and reports.
Download this content today!
Register Now Already registered? Click here to Log In
