In a lot of organisations, Accounts Payable is seen as a bottleneck and cause of repeated delays.
Invoices arrive from every direction, approvals drag, and the AP team is forced to act as a permanent fire-fighting unit. Their modus operandi? Chasing signatures, smoothing over suppliers, and trying to complete payment runs on time, without ever really having the levers to change much.
When people talk about best-in-class accounts payable, they’re talking about organisations where this looks very different. In these businesses, AP isn’t a back-office chore. It's a deliberately and carefully designed function that protects cash flow↗, strengthens supplier relationships, and gives leadership real visibility on how money leaves the business.
In other words, 'best-in-class' isn’t a badge, it’s a specific set of ideals and processes that are applied consistently by the finance team.
So what does that actually look like in practice? And how do finance teams get there?
1. AP has a mandate, not just a mailbox
In average finance teams, AP’s role is implicitly defined as “process invoices and pay suppliers”. It’s transactional by design, and when something goes wrong, the question is simply, “Why didn’t AP process this?”.
In a best-in-class accounts payable function, AP is given a mandate that’s tied to outcomes, not just activity. The team is explicitly responsible for things like on-time payment performance, cycle times and error rates. And these metrics are core to how success is defined.
This shift changes behaviour. When you’re measured on the percentage of invoices paid on time rather than the raw number of invoices processed, important questions arise.
You start to question how approvals work, how invoices arrive, and whether upstream processes are setting you up to fail. AP becomes a voice in the conversation about how the business buys, not just the place where invoices land.
It also changes who sits at the table. In best-in-class teams, AP leaders are involved in discussions about cash flow planning, system changes and procurement↗ strategy.
2. Policies are not just written, they're lived
Most organisations have a tangle of policies covering purchasing, approvals and payment terms. Most of the time these policies live buried in PDFs, which inevitably means that people skirt around them.
In a best-in-class AP environment, policy is treated as infrastructure. It’s there to make the right behaviour easy and the wrong behaviour obviously wrong.
Payment terms are a clear example. Instead of negotiating something new every time a contract is signed, finance and procurement agree standard terms by category or region. And they stick to them. Exceptions exist, but they’re truly exceptions, not the norm.
This consistency makes it easier to forecast cash, have honest conversations with suppliers and measure performance without constantly explaining away outliers.
The same applies to approvals and purchase orders. Approval thresholds are understood and aligned with risk. Everyone knows who needs to sign off what, and at what spend level POs become mandatory.
3. The AP process is designed on purpose, and kept simple
If you map the real AP process in many companies, you end up with a spaghetti diagram. Invoices arriving via ten different routes, escalated through personal inboxes, parked in spreadsheets and occasionally printed 'just in case'.
A best-in-class accounts payable team does the unglamorous work of design. They start by deciding what the standard journey for an invoice should be, where it comes in, how it’s captured, who touches it and when it gets paid. And they work hard to keep that journey simple.
Typically, there's one front door for invoices. Suppliers are clearly told where to send them and in what format, and internal teams are discouraged from creating side channels. That alone does a lot to cut down on 'lost' invoices and last-minute panics.
Variation is reduced wherever possible. There are standard approval paths, default coding patterns and predictable ways of handling common edge cases such as credit notes or partial deliveries. People are not inventing a new process every time a slightly unusual invoice appears.
Crucially, exceptions are treated as a signal, not just a nuisance. When an invoice falls out of the normal path, someone asks why. If the same issue appears repeatedly—missing POs, incorrect vendor data, mismatched pricing—the fix happens at the source, often in procurement or the ordering process.
Over time, more invoices follow the standard route, and the process gets faster and more reliable without anyone having to run harder.
4. Automation is a scalpel, not a buzzword
A lot of organisations talk about 'automating AP', but all they’ve really done is replace paper with PDFs and email. The underlying process is unchanged, and unfortunately just as slow.
In a best-in-class setup, automation is used more like a scalpel than a sledgehammer. Finance leaders think carefully about where technology can remove friction, enforce policy and provide visibility, and they’re honest about what should remain human.
They start with the fundamentals: a sensible process, clear rules and a defined picture of “good”. Then they bring in tools to support that design. Invoice capture technology removes manual data entry instead of simply storing images of invoices. Matching engines compare invoices to POs and receipts automatically so that only genuine exceptions require human judgment. Approval workflows are configured to reflect real-world rules, meaning approvers receive the right invoices with enough context to make quick decisions.
The focus is end-to-end rather than on isolated tools. The team thinks about how data flows from invoice capture to matching, from approval to payment, and into reporting. Integrations with ERP, procurement and banking systems are chosen to reduce swivel-chair work and duplicate entry, not add to it.
AI is approached with the same pragmatism. It’s used where it clearly improves the accounts payable cycle↗. For example, in data extraction quality, duplicate detection or prioritising exceptions. The goal is a coherent, dependable AP operation, not a collection of clever but disconnected features.
There are many different ways that finance teams can speed up AP↗, and AI in particular is fantastic for improving accuracy and reducing errors↗.
5. Data and KPIs are part of the operating rhythm
Ask a typical AP manager how things are going and you’ll often hear the same type of annecdotes. A big supplier was upset, approvals are 'slow', people are busy.
In a best-in-class accounts payable function, that picture is quantified. The team can describe what proportion of invoices are paid on time, how long they take to move from receipt to approval, and how often invoices hit exceptions. They can break that down by business unit, supplier segment or region. They know where bottlenecks are and whether they’re getting better or worse.
These aren’t vanity dashboards that live in a BI tool. They’re part of the operating rhythm. Metrics are reviewed regularly with finance leadership. If a particular department consistently drags its feet on approvals, someone has that conversation. If exception rates spike, AP sits down with procurement to understand what changed in the way orders are raised or vendor data is maintained.
6. Suppliers experience AP as a partner, not a black box
In many organisations, supplier relationship management is seen as procurement’s job. AP’s role is reactive: pay when told, answer questions when suppliers complain.
Best-in-class finance teams share the responsibility. They recognise that consistent, predictable payment behaviour isn’t just a 'nice to have'. It directly influences pricing, terms and resilience.
That starts with clarity. Suppliers know where to send invoices, how to include POs and where to go with queries. Response times are reasonable and honest, even if the answer is “we can’t pay this yet and here’s why”. Where possible, suppliers can see the status of their invoices without needing to email or call.
Internally, finance and procurement talk about key suppliers in the round: how important they are to the business, whether terms are still appropriate, whether there are opportunities for early payment discounts, and what improvements on the company’s side would make collaboration smoother.
The net effect is that AP becomes part of building a reliable supplier ecosystem. When the business needs flexibility, better terms, support through a tough period, or accelerated delivery, those relationships matter.
7. AP is built to scale and survive stress
Finally, there’s a structural difference between typical AP functions and best-in-class ones. In many teams, AP is just about coping with today’s volume. If invoice volumes doubled, the obvious lever would be to hire more people or work longer hours.
Best-in-class teams design AP for growth and resilience from the outset. They ask whether the current setup can handle more entities, more countries, more suppliers and more complexity without collapsing under its own weight.
That shows up in very concrete ways. Delegation rules for approvers, clear playbooks for when something breaks, and a habit of documenting how things work instead of letting knowledge live only in people’s heads.
The payoff isn’t just robustness in a crisis. It’s the ability to say 'yes' without AP becoming the bottleneck that slows everything down.
Turning 'best-in-class accounts payable' into something actionable
'Best-in-class' can easily sound like marketing fluff. But when you break it down, it’s a label for a specific way of running AP. Clear ownership, coherent policy, simple processes, smart automation, meaningful metrics, and respectful supplier relationships.
If you look at your own AP function and see a long way to go, the point isn’t to copy everything at once. A more practical approach is to treat these ideas as a benchmark:
- Does AP have a defined mandate and outcomes, or just an inbox?
- Are your policies something people follow, or something they work around?
- Is your AP process designed on purpose, or the result of years of improvisation?
- Is automation supporting the way you want to work, or just digitising existing pain?
- Do you share a data-backed view of AP performance across finance and the business?
- Are suppliers experiencing you as a predictable partner, or a source of friction?
- Could your current setup handle the business you want to be in three years’ time?
Answering those questions honestly is the first step. From there, improving your accounts payable setup is usually a matter of a few deliberate changes at a time, not a single grand transformation.
The finance teams that get there don’t just have fewer late payments or cleaner reports; they have an AP function that genuinely supports growth, resilience and better decision-making. And that’s a very different story from “the department that pays the bills.”
Managing your AP with Moss
Moss works with finance teams that want to move in exactly this direction. By giving AP a single, structured workflow for invoices, approvals and card spend, and tying that to clear policies, real-time data and smart automation , Moss helps turn all of these 'best-in-class' principles into something concrete and manageable.
Instead of living with firefighting and workarounds, teams use Moss to standardise how money leaves the business, reduce manual effort, and give leadership the visibility they need to grow with confidence.
