3 min
Half of Your AP Team Wants to Quit. That's On You.
By: Daniel Shore
Early in my career, I inherited an AP team that was - on paper - functioning.
Invoices were getting processed. Vendors got paid. The close was happening on time. By every traditional metric, things were fine.
But the team was miserable. Turnover was high. Energy was low. Nobody was proud of our work. And when I started asking questions about morale and why our culture was like that, I got the same general answer: we just put our heads down and get stuff done.
Getting things done is great, but if it's driving burnout – that's not a culture. That's a treadmill and creates a revolving door of employees coming and going.
AP teams are invisible until something breaks. Nobody thanks the mailman for showing up every day. But everyone notices when the mail doesn't come.
Why culture never makes the agenda
AP is transactional by nature. Invoices come in, invoices get paid. The work is measured in volume, speed, and cost per unit. Those are the metrics leadership sees, so those are the metrics that get managed.
Culture doesn't show up on a dashboard. It doesn't close the month. So it doesn't get talked about: not in leadership reviews, not in budget conversations, not in the room where decisions get made. Most senior AP leaders aren't ignoring culture on purpose. They just never had a framework for it, because nobody handed them one. The job was always defined by output, and culture lives upstream of output in a place most organizations never look.
That's a problem. Because the output is suffering because of it.
The numbers are worse than you think
The Institute of Finance and Management has studied this extensively. Their findings: more than half of AP professionals report being burned out, with many working upwards of 50 hours a week. And among those who are burned out, nearly one in four say they are considering leaving their organization. Zoom out further and the picture gets worse — nearly half of all AP professionals surveyed said they are at risk of leaving altogether.
Look at your team. Now assume half of them are quietly updating their resumes.
AP teams are invisible until something breaks. Nobody thanks the mailman for showing up every day. But everyone notices when the mail doesn't come.
When invoices are processed and books close on time, leadership says nothing. The moment a supplier gets shut off or a check gets lost, the calls start. AP is only in the room when something goes wrong. When you spend your career only being noticed for failures, it does something to a team.
Add volume pressure on top of that. When throughput becomes the entire job, you've told your team their value is output. Not judgment, not improvement. Just volume. Employees don't stay in jobs like that. At least not the good ones.
What the better teams did differently
The best AP teams I've been part of shared one trait: they were empowered to ask why.
Not just get it done, but to ask why are we doing it this way? That shift changes who you can recruit, how the team sees itself, and what work they're willing to take on.
One of the most effective moves I made was rebranding my AP team as Accounting Operations. It changed the entire mindset of our team and who we recruited. It opened the door to reconciliations, journal entries, work that accounting typically owns but AP-caliber people can handle. Suddenly I could recruit people with ambition, people working toward accounting degrees, people who wanted to build something, not just process it.
The other shift was getting out of my team's way. If someone saw a process problem and wanted to fix it, I didn't need to be in the middle of it. That kind of empowerment separates a team running on adrenaline from one running on ownership.
Burnout Is Real. But It's Not Inevitable
Burnout in AP is real and documented. But it isn't inevitable. It's the output of a culture that was never designed with the team in mind. If you're losing good people, the answer probably isn't compensation. It's whether they feel like they're building something, or just getting through the day.
AP Culture is part of an ongoing series from the AP Institute. See all of our content here.