What Happens When Ingrid Takes a Vacation
3 min
By: Daniel Shore
For me, it was Ingrid.
Every AP team seems to have one. The person who knows which buyer will answer, how to get a missing receipt entered, and which supplier needs a phone call instead of a portal notification. When something gets stuck we “Ask Ingrid.”
There is a compliment in that. There is also a warning.
One route exists in the process; the faster one exists in Ingrid's head.
Ingrid can make a disconnected process look connected. The invoice gets paid, the exception gets closed, and the dashboard returns to green. We recognize the super solvers, but don’t fix the bigger issue.
I like to ask What stops working when Ingrid takes a vacation?
Her absence exposes the handoffs your systems and procedures leave to tribal knowledge and persistence. If routine work needs a personal network to move, you have found a dependency worth fixing.
The exception closed but the dependency stayed
We always tracked whether an exception was resolved. That tells you the invoice moved. It tells you less about whether the next invoice will need the same rescue.
Imagine a missing receipt. Ingrid knows the right person in Receiving, gets it entered, and releases the invoice. A colleague sees the same exception but sends a request to a shared inbox and waits. Same system. Same exception. Different outcome.
The difference is the route to resolution. One route exists in the process; the faster one exists in Ingrid’s head.
The opportunity is to turn tribal knowledge into a repeatable handoff: a named owner, enough information to act, a response deadline, and a clear escalation when nothing happens.
Try the Ingrid test
Take ten recently resolved exceptions that required your most experienced person. Ask what they supplied that the process did not.
Were they finding an owner? Reconstructing information? Getting a decision? Chasing a response? Those answers point to different repairs. A missing owner needs accountability. Missing information needs a better upstream handoff. A stalled decision needs authority and escalation.
Then track one useful measure: the share of those repeat exceptions resolved through the agreed process without a personal rescue. Watch resolution time alongside it so you do not mistake slower work for progress.
Choose one recurring dependency and remove it. Let Ingrid help design the fix; she knows where the process actually breaks.
Give expertise a better job
This is also a useful test for automation. Before adding AI, ask which part of Ingrid’s work you expect it to take over. Drafting a reminder may save typing. Getting the issue to someone with the information and authority to resolve it changes the handoff.
Your experienced people should be improving supplier behavior, spotting patterns, and preventing the next problem. Every hour spent rescuing a familiar invoice is an hour unavailable for that work.
The best tribute to Ingrid is a process that lets her take a vacation.
