Stop Chasing Touchless. Get a Clean Close.
3 min
By: Daniel Shore
What if the best measure of AP isn’t whether AP touched the invoice, but whether Accounting has to touch it again at month-end?
For most of my career in AP, touchless processing has been one of my top goals. The idea is sound: get the invoice electronically, match it to the PO, route it and move it through without my team getting involved.
That made a lot of sense when we were replacing paper, keying invoices by hand and walking approval folders around the building. Everyone in AP started nodding along to touchless, whether or not it actually fit. Nobody argues against it. Nobody puts “More Manual Intervention” on the strategic roadmap. And if your touchless rate goes up, somebody gets to put a green arrow on a PowerPoint slide.
What if the best measure of AP isn't whether AP touched the invoice, but whether Accounting has to touch it again at month-end?
But my CFO isn’t really buying the green arrow. She wants fewer surprises and a close that doesn’t turn the first week of every month into a scavenger hunt. That’s where I think I may have been chasing the wrong goal.
The Beautiful Touchless Invoice
A touchless invoice can be a beautiful thing, like getting to work early because every light was magically green. (It never happens for me!). The PO matches, the receipt is there, coding is right, and nobody sends me an email with “Thoughts?” in the subject line.
The month-end close is a better test. Did everything we pushed ‘touchless’ actually make the close easier? Pushing invoices faster doesn’t accomplish much if Accounting has to untangle them later.
Start With the Close
If I were evaluating AP automation today, I’d spend more time with the Controller understanding what slowed the last close. Which supplier balances required research? Which accruals were created because an invoice or receipt was missing? Which journal entries corrected problems that started upstream? Which business units delivered the late surprises? Then I’d work backward.
Some roads lead to AP. Others lead to Purchasing, Receiving, the supplier or a system that never gave anyone enough information to act earlier. Looking at the close this way tells me more about where automation should go next than setting another five-point touchless target.
The Hard Work Is Hiding
Consider two hypothetical AP teams. One reports 50% touchless. The other half lands in an exception queue, and AP becomes the traffic cop: email the supplier, find the buyer, chase the receipt, follow up and repeat.
The other team reports only 34% touchless, but its exceptions don’t automatically become AP’s problem. Suppliers can see status and discrepancies. Buyers resolve price issues. Receiving owns missing receipts. Recurring problems are identified before the next invoice arrives.
Which operation would I rather inherit? The 34% team may actually have the better operating model if problems are being resolved by the people closest to them instead of continually landing back in AP.
That’s why I’ve become interested in metrics like Staff Intervention Rate. When an invoice falls off the happy path, how often does someone in AP still have to step in and coordinate the resolution?
A Touch Report
Break interventions down by source. How many started in Purchasing? Receiving? With the supplier? In master data?
Then look for concentration. If 40% of AP touches trace back to missing receipts, you don’t have an AP automation problem. You have a receiving problem showing up in AP. A simple Touch Report shows where your team is spending its time, where the process is breaking, and which problems are most likely to follow you all the way into the close.
A Better Finish Line
There will always be accruals, journal entries and accounting judgment. The opportunity is to remove the avoidable work: missing information, unresolved exceptions, preventable supplier questions and transactions that reach close still needing an explanation.
That’s where AP automation starts becoming finance automation. I’ll keep measuring touchless. I’ll happily take the green arrow on the PowerPoint slide. But I’d rather give my CFO a boring close.
