Non-PO invoices are a considerable "Pain Point" for AP personnel. In most cases the invoice is sent directly to the client for approval. From my personal experience some 40 percent of late payments at AT&T were the result of receiving the invoice for payment from the client after the terms had expired. However, when the KPIs are published, we in AP are usually blamed for the percentage of late payments which had nothing to do with our cycle time process.

The next several blog submissions will deal with what I call the "Pain Points" in Accounts Payable. The first deals with a "Pain Point" that is near the top of very AP professionals list, namely "Rush Checks". They are sometimes referred to as On-Demand or ASAP Requests.

When going from a widely decentralized accounts payable operation to a centralized one, there are bound to be some growing pains, as Rhode Island recently found out the hard way.

According to an article published in The Providence Journal, the Rhode Island state government is at least five weeks behind on payments to contracted companies providing state services. The backlog is a direct result of efforts to centralize disbursements.

An accounts payable (AP) shop has enough to worry about when making payments within the United States. When making international payments, complexity is heightened by issues such as currency, foreign language, customs and regulations. Those involved with international payments should be familiar with the payment methods used.

The potential for accounts payable (AP) payment errors is present in any shop, and the consequences are costly. In the worst case, a company loses the money associated with making a duplicate or over-payment, but even if the error is discovered and the payment recovered, the company has lost the interest on that money as well as the time and labor consumed by the recovery process.

How much does it cost to process an invoice? This question has been asked for years in various A/P benchmarking studies and there have been as many answers as there have been studies. Today the cost to process an electronic invoice varies from $1.00 to $5.00 depending on who publishes the data.

One of the problems in publishing invoice cost data is the predictable reaction from management when they see such data. Immediately you are put on the defense to explain why your cost for processing an invoice is higher than that contained in the benchmarking report.

Accounts payable (AP) professionals know that discovering more efficient ways to handle invoices is a major goal, and achieving it is never simple.