[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.
From Function to Force
To speed its journey, AP must expand its focus beyond its traditional remit. Today, leading AP teams are not simply processing transactions, they are influencing strategic areas that impact enterprise-wide value creation. This is seen most directly in three areas that are directly linked to AP processes:
- Cash management: AP’s command over cash disbursements to suppliers makes it one of the most impactful functions on cash management, including working capital optimization, liquidity, and cash forecasting. The timing of B2B payments should be a strategic lever that is actively managed, given the real cost of capital in 2025. In advanced organizations, treasury and AP are working in sync to optimize payment runs and align disbursements with broader liquidity goals. Payment precision can be a source of financial advantage.
- Supplier management: Smart businesses understand that suppliers should be viewed as a source of knowledge and expertise that can be leveraged for a competitive advantage and mutual gain. If tariffs start to significantly change the design of existing supply chains, AP can play an important role by facilitating fast onboarding, accurate and complaint payments, and smooth operational transitions. How AP and P2P teams approach their supplier relationships, and the results derived from them, will continue to have a major impact on enterprise operations and overall performance in the months and years ahead.
- Business intelligence: Data-driven approaches founded on the principles of data science, and broadened via integrated and collaborative intelligence, are prime means of accelerating AP performance and ultimately driving more value. As AI capabilities begin to emerge within finance and procurement operations, the data warehoused within AP presents a deep well of untapped value that can be extracted and converted into intelligence.
AP has made meaningful strides, but its impact in cash management, supplier management, and business intelligence remains uneven across the market. If AP leaders want to accelerate their journey and expand their strategic impact, they need a clear, intentional plan to strengthen their role across these critical areas.
ePayables Adoption Rates in 2025
For any modern business function to succeed, there is typically a set of solutions and services that can support everyday objectives. For the AP unit, in particular, many of these ePayables solutions solve day-to-day challenges while building long-term value. Over the past 20 years, the largest takeaway from the ePayables adoption figures is that a fully-automated AP operation is less commonplace than it should be.
Ardent Partners research also shows that ePayables solutions are well-equipped to combat high costs, contributing to processing cost reductions that can be as much as 60-80% when compared to manual- and paper-based methods. While the adoption numbers continue to move in the right direction, one-third of the market remains unautomated. Over the arc of this research series, the technology adoption trendline has been one marked by an occasional spike, followed by a long plateau. For example, finance leaders post-pandemic saw the folly of a fully manual AP operation and invested significantly. There are good early indications that AI, and the fear of missing out on it, will accelerate market adoption over the next three years. Time will tell.
The following breaks down the percentage of AP departments that have ePayables solutions in use today.
- Automated routing and approval workflow solutions (70%) have risen in popularity in recent years because the ability to route invoices for approval is critical for improving efficiency within the AP process. Routing and approval workflow solutions allow organizations to establish business rules to manage the approval process for both PO and non-PO-based invoices. PO-based invoices that are validated and match all of the pre- configured business rules can be processed “straight-through” without any human intervention and scheduled for payment. If there are exceptions that need to be managed, they are routed to the appropriate users for resolution.
- eInvoicing (67%) removes paper from the AP process by enabling suppliers to create and submit invoices electronically. The system maintains that format through the validation, matching, and approval processes. eInvoicing drives process efficiencies by eliminating data capture and manual data entry. eInvoicing solutions offer tremendous simplification on the process side, as well as cost savings in terms of price per invoice processed. This is most directly seen with solutions enabling “straight-through processing.” To gain the best returns on eInvoicing, supplier participation is needed.
- ePayments (67%) have also seen a sharp rise in adoption over the past few years due, in part, to a more holistic (and expanded) focus on the role of AP that now includes both invoice and payment processing. The availability of new ePayment solutions has also triggered greater interest in the area. While many AP departments remain focused on the front end of the process, more groups are realizing that ePayment solutions (which can tailor payments specific to certain suppliers utilizing a variety of electronic means, including ACH, commercial/ payment cards, virtual cards, wire transfer, etc.) are vital to completing the full cycle of P2P.
- Automated data capture and extraction solutions (60%) are traditionally one of the first solutions typically deployed by an AP department. While this technology delivers value in the form of increased efficiencies, it is simply a starting point in a larger AP transformation and why it is no longer the most adopted technology.
- Payment/business networks (37%) can function as the nexus for payment, purchasing, supplier management, invoicing, and communication/collaboration activity between an enterprise and its supplier base. As AP teams push for higher levels of supplier enablement, network platforms become a valuable way to scale these efforts and develop tighter relationships.
