Invoices arrive on paper, in shared inboxes and on individual desks. Someone rekeys the totals, someone else waits on an approver, and a vendor calls to ask when they'll be paid. If that sounds familiar, your vendor invoice process is probably costing more time and money than anyone has measured. 10 Steps to an Efficient Vendor-Invoice Process, from SAP Concur, is written for finance and accounts payable leaders who want to find those hidden costs and do something about them.
Spending plans rarely hold still. The economy speeds up and slows down, tax rules change, and company priorities shift. A process held together by manual handoffs and spreadsheets has a hard time keeping up. The answer starts with an honest look at how your AP team works today.
A practical path to vendor invoice process improvement
The guide is built as ten practical steps that move from diagnosis to a plan for change. It opens with a self-audit: a set of pointed questions about how invoices are received, how they're processed and approved, and what happens after payment. Use it as an AP audit checklist your team can work through together to spot the pain points you've learned to live with, such as duplicate invoices, late payment fees and the hours lost answering vendor payment inquiries.
From there, it covers the everyday friction that slows AP down. You'll see why paper and spreadsheets struggle to support a modern payables function, where invoice capture can be simplified, and how automation reduces the room for human error and fraud. Other steps look at mobile approvals for hybrid teams and at giving vendors a way to check payment status without calling your staff.
After reading, you'll be able to:
- Compare your current AP process against industry best practices
- Pinpoint the stages where time and money leak out
- Understand which reports help you manage cash flow and negotiate with vendors
- Decide where your team's freed-up time should go
How to estimate your invoice processing costs
Many teams sense that manual invoice handling is expensive but can't say how expensive. The guide includes a worked hypothetical scenario that adds up invoice volume, staff time spent on data capture and approvals, and exception handling to arrive at an annual processing cost. It's a simple model you can adapt to your own numbers, and it makes the cost of doing nothing much harder to ignore.
That exercise feeds directly into a stronger case for change. Once you know where your staff's hours go, you can identify operational inefficiencies and show leadership what a better process would be worth.
Building the case for accounts payable automation
Later steps turn to what you gain from invoice automation. The guide draws on third-party research, including Analysys Mason's 2022 Travel, Expense, and Vendor Invoice Management Study, for figures on average savings per invoice, estimated annual savings and the typical time to positive AP automation ROI. It also cites fraud research from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners to frame why duplicate and fraudulent invoices deserve attention.
You'll also find sample spend reports that show what better data looks like in practice: monthly invoice spend, spend by expense type, top vendors and trends over time. These views help you understand how your payment cycle affects cash and where you have room to negotiate better rates.
The final step helps you build a vision for your AP team once routine work is automated, from spotting overspending to supporting company-wide decisions. The closing pages explain how SAP Concur Invoice brings capture, auditing, routing, approval and payment into a single digital process, alongside Concur Expense and Concur Travel.
Download 10 Steps to an Efficient Vendor-Invoice Process to get the full self-audit questions, the cost assessment scenario, the research-backed savings and ROI figures, and practical tips for cutting manual work. It's a short read that gives you a clear starting point for fixing your AP process and the numbers to support the conversation with leadership.