If Q4 is a stressful scramble for your finance team, you’re in good company. By the time the final quarter of the year rolls around, most accounts payable leaders are knee-deep in accounts year-end review, month-end close, and audit preparations. As a result, planning for the coming year often gets put off until January. 

It’s easy to see why new year planning falls to the back burner. When finance leaders are bogged down by year-end wrap-up, there’s often little time left to spend planning for the future. But finance leaders who put off planning do so at their own peril. After all, once January rolls around, the opportunity to influence the budget or get headcount approved is often long gone. 

On the other hand, finance leaders who start the new year with clear AP goals and KPIs, a documented baseline, and a technology roadmap in hand are better equipped to make a case for investment before budgets are final. So if you want to set yourself up for success in January, now’s the best time to start planning. 

This accounts payable planning guide can help you stay ahead of the game. It covers how to measure your current AP performance, set goals that go beyond labor savings, evaluate your existing technology stack, build a business case that resonates with leadership, and benchmark your progress against industry peers.

Determine an honest baseline 

Every effective AP planning guide starts with establishing an honest baseline. If you don’t understand your current state, it’s nearly impossible to set effective goals and determine the impact of potential AP process improvements. 

Building a baseline requires documenting a variety of AP metrics and comparing them against accounts payable benchmarks specific to your industry. These are some of the key metrics to include:

Cost per invoice

Calculate the cost of processing one invoice from upload to payment. Industry estimates place the cost per invoice between $15 to $25 for organizations that still process invoices manually. This number is often lower for organizations that automate the AP process. 

Invoice lifecycle time

Determine how long it takes for an invoice to flow through the entire processing cycle, from initial receipt to payment. Ottimate data shows that customers have reduced invoice lifecycle processing from 11 days to under five days with AP automation. 

GL coding accuracy rate 

Track how often invoice line items are correctly coded on the first try. Ottimate customers experience 93-95% GL coding accuracy rates on first pass for automated accounts. 

Duplicate invoice rate and dollar value caught vs. missed

Calculate how often your organization sees duplicate invoices and the value of the duplicates that are caught versus those that fly under the radar. 

Payment error rate and recovery rate

Measure how frequent payment errors are and how often your organization is able to recover the losses from those errors. Payment errors are expensive and hard to recover once funds have left the account, so prevention is key.

Late fees incurred and early payment discounts missed

Calculate how often you’ve incurred late fees and missed early payment discounts and the total value of each. Inefficient processes are often to blame for high numbers. 

Hours spent on manual exception handling, statement reconciliation, and month-end close 

Estimate how much time your team spends on these labor-intensive tasks. This baseline will help you understand the time savings of process optimizations and tech investments. 

Set goals that go beyond labor savings

Often, AP planning cycles focus on the single goal of reducing headcount or labor hours, but this narrow approach overlooks the broader value that AP process improvement can deliver to finance organizations.

Once you’ve established your baseline, the next step of the AP planning guide is to start setting goals. But don’t focus solely on labor savings. Instead, build a plan that includes both hard ROI and soft ROI. 

Hard ROI is value that’s easy to quantify. Some common examples include labor savings, decreased processing costs, and fewer payment errors. Soft ROI includes benefits that are more difficult to quantify, yet still very valuable. Some examples include greater visibility, better decision-making, and improved audit readiness. 

Set goals across both categories to paint a more complete picture of value and build a stronger case for future investments. Here are some examples of each type of goal.

Hard ROI goal examples 

Hard ROI goals are tied to metrics you can easily track and report throughout the year.

• Reduce cost per invoice by X%
• Reduce invoice lifecycle time from [current] to [target]
• Catch X% more duplicate invoices
• Capture $X in early payment discounts currently being missed
• Decrease late fees by $X

Soft ROI goal examples

Soft ROI goals are often harder to assign a dollar value to, but their impact can be just as meaningful on finance operations. Leaving them out creates an incomplete picture of ROI. 

• Decrease month-end close time from X days to Y days
• Improve first-pass GL coding accuracy to 95%+ 
• Spend less staff time on exception handling and more on strategic work 
• Build audit-ready documentation without manual preparation

When establishing your goals, be sure to compare your baseline metrics against accounts payable benchmarks for your industry. The 2026 AP Benchmarks by Industry can help you understand how your AP metrics, such as invoice lifecycle time, GL coding accuracy, and cost per invoice compare to others in your industry. This can help you identify opportunities for improvement and set realistic, data-driven goals. 

Take stock of your existing AP technology stack 

One of the most common AP planning mistakes is building a business case for new technology before understanding the capabilities and limitations of your existing tech stack.

By now, most businesses have adopted some form of AP automation technology. But a recent survey found that the vast majority are taking a piecemeal approach to automation that combines point tools with manual work. For example, they might use OCR for invoice capture and an approval routing tool. But other parts of the workflow, including GL coding and payments, are still handled manually. 

Adding another tool might seem like the easy answer to addressing a specific AP challenge. But in most cases, it just makes life more complicated. Tools don’t always talk to each other, and they don’t always integrate with the business’s ERP. That means teams are often left managing clunky handoffs and reconciling data across disconnected systems. 

Before rushing out to add another tool, finance leaders should audit their existing tech stack, focusing on what tools are in place, what’s working, what’s not, and where there might be unnecessary overlap. 

Here are some key questions that can help guide the tech audit. 

• Which steps in our AP process are still manual, and how many hours do they take up? 
• Which systems don’t talk to each other, and when is staff rekeying data into multiple systems? 
• Does our current AP tool integrate natively with our ERP, or is the integration a manual workaround?
• Are we getting reliable real-time reporting, or do we only find out about problems at the end of the month? 
• What’s our current duplicate detection rate, and what are we missing?  

The answers to these questions can help you identify opportunities to streamline your tech stack and improve finance operations. 

Build the business case before budget season (and your opportunity to influence it) is over 

When AP leaders wait until January to make the case for new technology investment, they’re usually too late to influence the budget. The most successful AP leaders set themselves up for success by building the business case well before budget season ends. 

When building your business case, use the baseline metrics you established earlier in this AP planning guide and show how AP process improvements will deliver ROI and support broader business goals. Avoid centering the entire business case around labor savings. Instead, aim to communication the full financial and operational impact of improving the AP process. 

The chart below can serve as a starting point for building a strong business case. 

When estimating potential savings, use benchmark data as a reference point. For example, Ottimate grocery customers save an average of $53,400 per year in labor costs from invoice lifecycle time reduction alone. When combined with other benefits including lower payment processing costs, fewer late fees, and more captured early payment discounts, the total projected impact is far greater.  

There are also certain things to avoid when building your business case. For one, steer clear ROI models that are built entirely on labor savings because they rarely capture the full value of AP process improvements. Also, avoid using vendor-provided ROI calculators as-is. Instead, use them as a starting point and adjust as needed with your actual invoice volumes, labor costs, and current performance metrics. Finally, while it’s important to incorporate soft ROI, avoid doing so without attempting to quantify it. Leadership responds to numbers, so estimate soft ROI whenever possible, such as reducing month-end close by two days or decreasing staff time spent resolving invoice exceptions by 25%. 

By getting an early start rather than waiting until the last minute, your business case will be complete before budget discussions even begin. That’ll give you time to validate assumptions, gather stakeholder feedback, and refine your proposal before funding decisions are made. 

Evaluate AP software vendors the right way 

AP leaders that evaluate automation vendors during planning season are better positioned to make thoughtful decisions than those that don’t start to weigh their options until an operational pain point becomes unbearable. 

During the vendor evaluation process, avoid being distracted by a flashy list of features of functionality. Instead, focus on finding a solution that will solve your biggest operational challenges, integrate with your ERP and other key technology, and help you achieve the goals you established earlier in this accounts payable planning guide.

As you consider your options, keep an eye out for these common red and green flags.

Now’s the time to start your AP planning for next year

The end of the year is a busy time for every AP leader. But AP leaders who push planning until January miss the opportunity to influence the budget and secure investments that can drive meaningful business impact.

Instead, use this AP planning guide to start planning for next year now. That way, you can confidently walk into the new year with a realistic baseline, clear goals, and a technology roadmap for achieving them.