Procure-to-pay has every right to be strategic. And we’re giving it the opportunity

Most spend in any business is recurring and relatively routine. It’s the rest of the spend that’s the problem. New or one-off spend, or invoices that no longer match what was originally signed as the prices have crept or the scope has changed. 

The decisions shaping the invoice are made weeks and months earlier, without finance involvement, and the context - the negotiation, contract, terms etc - is not shared or easily accessed. And then once the invoice appears or isn’t what was expected, it’s Accounts Payable’s (AP’s) job to figure out why.

It’s the epitome of Pareto’s law - 20% of spend consumes 80% of AP’s time. 

And so, procure-to-pay (P2P) becomes an administrative task, judged on tactical measures such as cost per invoice, PO cycle times or invoice approval speed. In other words, how quietly and cheaply the team processes what everyone else has decided. 

Once it becomes disruptive and expensive, it is treated as a training problem - another course on GL coding, a tighter policy doc, or a reminder to raise a PO before you buy anything. 

Inevitably, it doesn’t work. Nothing changes. But that’s because the people were never the issue. They were let down by systems that were never built to solve this issue, and nobody invested in them, because P2P wasn't where the ambition was.

Sourcing, negotiation and supplier management have all had real strategic investment behind them. Procurement leaders have been given strong foundations to build the structures and operating models that let their teams add real strategic value, not just hold the line on cost. 

P2P has the same strategic potential. It just needs the investment pointed at the right things, and right now it mostly isn't.

Where the investment has actually gone

There’s a clear pattern in where the big P2P platforms have put their money over the past couple of years: acquiring document-processing companies, wiring AI agents into the invoice inbox, pushing extraction accuracy up another percentage point. Useful work, but it's the same tactical ground P2P has always occupied. Very little touches the requisition, the PO, the approval chain, the gap between agreeing a price and actually paying it. 

A new global ecommerce customer is walking away from their five-year commitment to an invoice automation suite because it solved the wrong problem. Invoices were being read better, but they weren’t getting any closer to understanding why the invoice said what it did.  

What could happen if we thought about P2P differently?

P2P has every opportunity to be a strategic function. Rather than spending time ‘playing detective’ tracking down why invoices are appearing or fluctuating, AP teams could be optimizing working capital, forecasting cash flow, and predicting budget changes.

All it requires is a change in the information it has access to.

What if, when an invoice arrives, it was matched not only to the PO, but to the entire conversation surrounding the purchase from the very start?

It seems remarkable that this isn't the case already.

But of course it isn’t. 

Legacy ERPs, P2P and payment platforms focussed on the end of the process. When building invoice reconciliation and payment capabilities, they got stuck in loops of refinements that simply improved AP’s tactical role. And where they did try and solve the context problem, they had no option but to bolt on a view of the rest of the process through clunky integrations. 

One global manufacturer we spoke with - a victim of this exact scenario - described trying to reconcile a single invoice as "a hunting and gathering exercise", navigating a CLM, inbox and ERP, and still being left with gaps in the story, or contradictions. 

But what if you started from the beginning of the process and built forward? 

That is the advantage that Vertice has. We already have the context.

We've added incrementally from the origination of the invoice - the vendor, the price, the initial request, the approvals and the negotiation - making the entire history visible further through the process, to every user, all the way to its eventual payment. And giving reassurance that decisions were made responsibly and compliantly.

When intake-to-procure and procure-to-pay sit on one platform, AP can open the negotiation history and the contract themselves and check the invoice against the actual terms, without pulling anyone else in to interpret it for them. The initial business case, approvals, contract negotiation, benchmark data, rate, terms and service period should all sit together on the same record as the payment.  

No more detective work to simply make a payment. But more importantly, this knowledge unlocks the ability to add real value to the business. Finance teams could use payment terms to their advantage to manage cash flow and capital better. They could catch opportunities for early-payment discounts. And could use benchmark data and external pricing intelligence to anticipate how costs will change, and pre-empt budget adjustments. Suddenly, AP is adding quantifiable dollar value. 

Every generation of P2P until now was designed to pay invoices. Ours is the first to be built and equipped to give context - and the tools the function needs to fulfil its strategic potential.

Discover more about Vertice P2P >