Are piles of invoices giving you sleepless nights? As your SaaS company scales, manually managing your accounts payable (AP) quickly becomes impractical. Manual AP jeopardizes vendor relationships and contributes to cash flow problems. Luckily, cloud-based automation offers a better way.
Understanding the Need to Automate AP
AP has a simple set of objectives: get vendors paid quickly and promote efficiency around your AP workflows. But a lot more goes into AP than is immediately apparent.
Your payables team juggles a wide variety of daily tasks:
Tackling this manually isn't in your employees' or vendors' best interest. Manual invoice processing frequently leads to delays and errors, causing frustration for both suppliers and accounting teams.
Why Cloud AP Beats Legacy Systems
Speed and Accuracy
Cloud AP solutions process invoices in minutes rather than days. Optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning extract data from invoices automatically, matching them against purchase orders and flagging discrepancies for review.
Anywhere Access
With cloud-based AP, your team can review and approve invoices from any device, anywhere. This eliminates bottlenecks caused by physical document routing and in-office requirements.
Audit-Ready Records
Every action is logged automatically. Cloud AP creates a complete, searchable audit trail that simplifies compliance and eliminates the scramble during audit season.
Vendor Relationship Management
Automated AP means vendors get paid on time, every time. This strengthens relationships, unlocks early payment discounts, and positions your company as a preferred customer.
The Power of Touchless Invoicing
The ultimate goal of AP automation is "touchless" processing, where invoices flow from receipt to payment without manual intervention. Modern cloud platforms achieve this through:
The CFO's Role in AP Transformation
As CFO, you're uniquely positioned to champion AP automation. Start by quantifying the cost of your current process, time per invoice, error rates, late payment penalties, then build the business case for automation.
Exafort helps SaaS companies modernize their AP workflows with cloud accounting solutions that scale with your business. From system selection to implementation and optimization, we're your partner in financial transformation.
Benchmark before you automate
AP is one of the best-benchmarked processes in finance, so there is no need to guess at your baseline. APQC's Open Standards Benchmarking maintains a cross-industry measure for the total cost to process accounts payable per invoice processed, built from outsourced, overhead, personnel, systems, and other costs. Its accounts payable key benchmarks collection, last updated January 2026, also covers the percentage of disbursements that are first-time error free and the cycle time from invoice receipt to payment transmission.
Those three measures, cost per invoice, first-time-error-free rate, and receipt-to-payment cycle time, are the numbers to capture before the project and again ninety days after go-live.
