[Editor’s Note: Ardent Partners recently published its Accounts Payable-themed report, “The State of ePayables 2025: AP’s Unfinished Journey.” Over the next several weeks, this site will feature our series highlighting key AP management strategies and top priorities for 2025.
Now in its 20th year, Ardent Partners’ annual State of ePayables 2025 report offers a unique vantage point into one of the most underappreciated, yet essential, areas of enterprise finance. What was once viewed as a purely tactical function has steadily evolved into a hub of insight, control, and value creation for the broader organization.
Over the past two decades, AP has undergone a significant transformation, shaped by macroeconomic events, technological advancements, and demand for agility, compliance, and efficiency. In the early 2000s, most AP departments were drowning in paper, with manual data entry, error-prone approvals, and late payments serving as the norm. The early research done by Ardent Partners’ analysts showed that average invoice processing costs could easily exceed $20 per invoice and cycle times regularly stretched more than 20 days. Twenty years later, those numbers are less than half of what they were.
The 2010s brought a wave of digital transformation, and with it, eventually, a focus on AP. ePayables solutions began to reduce the burden of paper invoices and accelerate processing cycles. Ardent Partners’ research during this period highlighted the significant improvement in metrics, like straight-through processing, as AP leaders embraced workflow automation and document digitization. By the late-2010s, forward-looking AP teams were beginning to shift from simply “processing transactions” to “managing information and relationships.”
The 2020s introduced a new set of challenges and opportunities, most notably the COVID-19 pandemic, which clearly revealed the problem with manual AP processes. Many AP teams were forced to return to physical offices to process invoices during the lockdowns as a way to ensure business continuity. During that time, executives saw the folly in ignoring AP, leading to a spike in ePayables solutions investments. As more AP teams became automated, many simultaneously became more strategic, creating stronger synergies with procurement and treasury.
In 2025, these functional partners now turn to AP not just for transaction support, but for insight on and assistance with their own priorities. More recently, the rising cost of capital has added new importance to how and when suppliers are paid, and has drawn AP closer to the center of cash flow management and supplier relationship management. AP’s potential has started to emerge and the introduction of AI should help accelerate it. But how AP sees itself, and how the rest of the business views AP also matters.
