AP Wasn’t Supposed to Be Air Traffic Control
We automated workflows. Now we need to land the plane.
By: Henry Ijams, Stream Tech Advisors
I remember when getting separated at an airport, mall, or stadium meant agreeing on one thing: “Meet back here at 3:00.” No texts. No location sharing. No Find My.
Today, our phones can tell us where our spouse is, when the garage door opens, and exactly where our luggage is—usually somewhere we aren’t. We’ve never been more connected, yet being connected hasn’t put us more in control.
AP has the same problem. Exceptions rarely belong to AP alone.
AP Has Become the Control Tower
We’ve spent two decades connecting AP to procurement, invoice capture, approval workflows, supplier portals, email and Teams. Yet when something goes wrong, AP still ends up coordinating the response.
Take a price mismatch. Purchasing knows why the price changed. Receiving knows what arrived. The supplier knows what they shipped. AP knows none of those things, but owns the exception.
So AP checks the PO, chases the receipt, finds the buyer, emails the supplier and keeps the invoice moving. None of that effort shows up neatly in a processing metric. It doesn’t lower the exception count or lift the touchless rate. It keeps one invoice from stalling, and then the next one lands.
That is not really invoice processing. It is coordination work.
We Automated the Transaction, Not the Coordination.
Despite years of AP automation, exceptions remain stubbornly common. For many of the organizations I’ve worked with, roughly 11–14% of invoices still become manual exceptions. Even after automating the happy path, that’s roughly one in eight invoices requiring an AP expert to step in and keep things moving.
That helps explain how AP automation has evolved—and why there’s still so much stress.
Generation 1: Digitize. Paper became electronic.
Generation 2: Automate workflows. Capture, matching and routing became increasingly automated.
Generation 3: Auto-coordination. Systems, teams and suppliers share enough context to resolve—or prevent—problems without AP directing every flight.
The work left over is increasingly coordination work. No amount of Gen 2 tooling helps you land the plane. It moves the queue from a keyboard to the inbox.
Your Supplier Is in the Same Airspace
A Lockheed Martin supplier described the problem from the other side: “We had no idea if they received our invoice. We had no idea when we were going to get paid.”
That supplier was not disorganized. They had submitted correctly and on time. They simply could not see what happened next, so they did the only thing available to them: contact AP.
Ardent Partners found AP teams spend about 22% of staff time dealing with supplier inquiries—more than one day of every five-day workweek.
That’s not processing. That’s coordination.
Giving suppliers better visibility removes work from AP by letting suppliers answer more questions themselves and resolve issues earlier.
Maybe We’re Measuring the Wrong Thing
My clients measure exception rates, touchless rates, processing time and cost per invoice. Those metrics are useful, but I think there’s another metric worth watching: Staff Intervention Rate.
What percentage of invoice exceptions still require an AP employee to step in to get them resolved?
The Exception rate tells you how often the process breaks. Staff Intervention Rate tells you how often AP still has to enter the control tower and direct traffic.
That distinction matters. Two AP departments can have the same exception rate but very different workloads. If one system allows suppliers, Purchasing and Receiving to resolve most issues themselves while the other requires AP to research, email, chase and coordinate every exception, the operational burden is completely different.
And so is AP team stress levels.
Think about that 11–14% exception rate differently:
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Can a supplier identify a mismatch before submitting an invoice?
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Can Purchasing resolve a price discrepancy without AP acting as middleman?
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Can the system recognize that the same exception has happened six times and prevent the seventh?
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Can AI bring together enough context to resolve routine issues without another email chain?
The goal isn't simply fewer exceptions. It's fewer exceptions that need AP.
Clear the Runway
The first generation of AP transformation digitized transactions. The second automated workflows.
The next needs to reduce the Staff Intervention Rate.
That doesn’t mean eliminating people. It means reserving AP expertise for the problems that actually require it—not using AP professionals as the integration layer between systems, suppliers, Purchasing and Receiving.
Because AP was never supposed to be air traffic control.
The next productivity frontier is getting systems, teams and suppliers to coordinate without AP stuck in the tower.
4 min
AP was never supposed to be air traffic control.