3 min
Our AP System Was So Bad I Thought I Was Being Hazed. Yes, Really.
By: Daniel Shore
I sat there waiting for her to return a laugh, a smile, to provide any signal that this was a joke. No signal came. This was a major retailer, a real company, with a real finance department. But she didn't seem to be joking.
So I got in the elevator, rode up to the top floor, and sheepishly approached the CEO's executive assistant. I still was unsure if this was an elaborate prank. I explained why I was there. The assistant acted like she was expecting me and handed over a small stack of invoices she'd already collected.
In one of my first jobs out of college, my manager pulled me aside.
It was the end of the month and she had an assignment for me. We had to close the books, but were short on invoices. Some hadn't been approved yet, and we needed them to run our accruals.
"Go up to the CEO's office," she said "and look through his desk for invoices he hasn't sent down yet."
I gave out a nervous laugh. I'd never been to the CEO's office, which took up half the top floor of our 20-story building. I thought she was hazing me.
Go up to the CEO's office and look through his desk for invoices he hasn't sent down yet.
"Check his inbox too, just in case," she said, unlocking his office door for me. I went through the papers on his desk and collected everything we needed.
This was accepted practice, apparently. Business as usual. Every month end, someone from AP made the pilgrimage upstairs to recover invoices that were floating around on the CEO's desk, unsigned and unprocessed, while the clock ticked on the close. Later I realized that I still needed his signatures on several of the invoices, and had to make a return trip upstairs the next day.
This was in 2012, the company went out of business in 2020.
I'm not saying there was correlation between that invoice process and the later bankruptcy. You can draw your own conclusions.
The AP Worst Practice: AP With No Visibility and No Authority
There's a problem with manual processes, of course. But the larger issue is that manual processes provide no transparency, no insights, no coordination or escalation path
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In the case of my former company, an executive would sit on unsigned invoices for weeks without anyone knowing what was going on. The solution the company had landed on, apparently for years, was to physically send someone upstairs to recover paper. And the result was angry suppliers, a burned out AP team, and chaos at the end of every month.
When invoice approval lives in someone's physical inbox, on their desk, or buried in an email folder they check when they feel like it, your close process is only as fast as the slowest person in the chain. And that person is usually the one with the least incentive to move quickly.
The fix isn't about holding executives accountable. It's about removing the friction entirely. Digital workflows, automated reminders, and true 360-degree visibility, for both AP teams and suppliers. Make it easier to approve an invoice than to ignore it. When AP has to chase paper, something upstream is broken.
AP is often written off as a transactional function: Pay the bills and move on. But when the department has no visibility and no authority, the whole business feels it. The whole supply chain struggles because of it. Suppliers don't get paid on time, books don't close cleanly, and someone ends up riding an elevator twice to collect a signature.
The good news is that most of these problems aren't hard to fix. They just require someone willing to ask: why exactly are we still doing it this way?
AP Worst Practices is part of an ongoing series from the AP Institute. See all of our content here.