Accounts payable isn’t flashy, but inefficient AP is silently bleeding money from your business every day a new report has revealed.
According to Prospend’s new report, Stop the AP Leak, Duplicate Payments, Slow Approvals and What Top CFOs Do Next, many finance teams accept slow approvals as normal, but manual processes are quietly draining time, money and performance.
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The report interviewed key financial leaders including:
- Kerryn Divall, Chief Financial Officer, RSL NSW
- Emma Fisher, Managing Director, Evolve Consultancy Group
- Lou Krstevski, Principal & CFO, BAC Consulting & Advisory
- Michelle Kvello, Managing Director & CFO, Lantern Partners
- Retief Lampen, Chief Financial Officer, Iion
- Riley Redford, Chief Financial Officer, Blabb Studio
- Tamanna Relia, Founder / Director, Cents & Solutions
- David Weber, Chief Financial Officer, Fortiro
- Morgan Wilson, Founder and Director, Creditte
- Maximilian Zielinski, Chief financial Officer, Factor Corp
“Manual or paper-based AP processes expose organisations to real and growing risks. The hidden costs include slow, labour-intensive processing where invoices take weeks to approve, frequent errors and duplicates from manual data entry, limited visibility into payables and cash flow, missed early payment discounts, and compliance and fraud risks from messy audit trails. Every extra day an invoice sits unapproved is a day cash flow and credibility takes a hit,” says ProSpend’s CEO and Founder, Sharon Nouh.
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These costs aren’t just monetary, they also squander potential. As Lou Krstevski, CFO of Sydney-based financial services firm BAC Consulting & Advisory, points out.
“The cost of outdated manual AP systems and processes go far beyond staff time. They also prevent an organisation from reallocating skills to more value-added tasks. Other costs include the damage to corporate goodwill and professional image when there is constant leakage through duplicates, errors, unchecked bank records,” he says.
In high-stakes industries such as construction, AP delays can literally stop work. Maximilian Zielinski, CFO of Factor Corp, shares just how risky manual AP can be.
“Errors or delays can hold up projects, create disputes, or strain supplier trust. In an industry where cash flow is everything, these inefficiencies carry real financial weight,” he says.
Morgan Wilson, Founder and Director of Brisbane-based firm Creditte, calls the detective work of fixing mismatches a ruinous use of resources.
“Teams spend hours matching invoices to POs and receipts, often in spreadsheets. Every handoff is a chance for an error to creep in, and fixing mistakes takes twice as long as preventing them,” he says.
Many of these issues stem from inaccurate invoice data. Staggeringly, of the 1.2 billion invoices exchanged in Australia each year, 1 in 5 is sent to the wrong person and nearly 1 in 3 contains incorrect information, according to the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman.
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Emma Fisher of Sydney-based Evolve Consultancy underscores that bad invoice data undermines everything.
“If invoice data isn’t accurate, the financials built on top of it can’t be trusted,” she says.
In short, bad data = bad decisions. If invoices aren’t checked properly, budgets and forecasts become fantastical.
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