Financial key performance indicators (KPIs) are important for any organization—without them, there is no understanding of the financial health of a company. Strategic decision-making cannot happen without accurate and up-to-date financial data backing up decisions, and planning and forecasting becomes a shadowy attempt.
But what about accounts payable?
The Broken Loop of Accounts Payable
Often overlooked and underinvested, accounts payable, or AP, teams can be left to languish with outdated software and stuck in obsolete processes without intervention.
It may seem unlikely, but many AP teams remain in technological darkness. According to the recent 2025 report from the Institute of Financial Operations and Leadership’s Accounts Payable Automation Trends 2025, AP teams are spending more time than ever on processing tasks; 63% are spending 10 hours a week on invoices, and 66% of teams are still manually entering invoices. Shockingly, 10% of teams reported still relying entirely on paper documents.
So how do teams track KPIs when they are still relying on paper documents, manually uploading AP data into inefficient software, and often don’t even know where to start?
This is where the business case for AP automation comes in.
The First Step of AP Automation
Implementing automation for an ERP system like NetSuite can do more than unlock automation; often the process of establishing automation prompts teams to understand where exactly their processes need to be improved. It is this first step that can be the catalyst to so many other improvements for an AP team and help them discover what they need to be tracking to understand the state of their financial operations.
KPIs that are commonly tracked to determine the effectiveness of accounts payable automation include:
- Total Number of Payments
- Total $ Amount of Payments
- Days Payable Outstanding
- Percentage of Invoices Paid on Time
- Invoice Exception Rate
- Early Payment Discounts Captured
- AP Aging Report
- Duplicate Payments Rate
- Total or percentage of Invoices Going Straight Through (for highly automated organizations)
- Invoice Queues
- Taxes Outstanding
- Invoices Received but not Invoices by Month-end
For more information on KPIs and understanding the importance of AP metrics, check out this blog from the Institute of Finance and Management here.
If you’re not tracking these KPIs, your organization can miss out on significant benefits. Rebates and discounts for early payments, eradicating late fees, avoiding delays—these are all areas where improvements can net significant monetary savings. In addition, streamlining the approvals process and updating vendor information can lead to significant gains in time savings for your AP team; these processes can be aided by the creation of back-ups and hierarchies to ensure work is continuously being done even when employees are out of the office. Even just automating one of these functions can give AP professionals dozens of hours or even multiple days back.
When considering the investment into accounts payable automation, the question to ask yourself is: what could your team do with multiple days back?
Future-Proofing Your AP Operations
The reality of modern accounts payable is that without even the most basic forms of automation, your financial operations are being set up to fail. Organizations cannot grow without empowering their AP teams to be able to scale appropriately—and human labor simply cannot make up for the increase in work without automated processes in place.
Inaccurate data is another key consideration; reporting from Gartner in 2024 showed 18% of accountants stating they made financial errors every day, 30% making at least a few financial errors every week and 59% making several errors per month. Manual data entry inevitably leads to errors in data, and without automation, there is no way to eradicate the risk.
For more information on quantifying the ROI of AP automation, the extra benefits of unlocking automation, and the integrationless perspective, download our business case to learn how to build your business case for AP automation.
