The CFO was furious. And on the surface, I understood why. Paying an electricity bill is one of the most basic things a person or a company can do. If you can't do the simple things, like keeping the lights on, how is a company going to do the hard things, the strategic things?
But here's a bit more context: we had 1,200 locations. 1,200 locations across countless utilities, in multiple states, with different billing cycles, different payment portals, different rules about auto-debit. Some accepted ACH. Some required checks. Some required checks and a coupon torn from the bill. And tracking whether a check was sent and received and applied — not just sent — across all of that? Manually? It was not a cash flow or billing problem. It was a messy data and visibility issue.
Then there is another wrinkle no one talks about: fraudulent disconnect notices. Have you ever heard about the boy that cried "Wolf!"? Well, scammers send fake shutoff threats to AP departments, hoping someone panics and gives a credit card over. So when a real disconnect notice arrives, teams have to stop and verify it's legitimate before responding. No one believed that there was a real wolf at the door this time, which reduced urgency.
Eventually, I figured the juice was not worth the squeeze. I outsourced utility bill management to a third party. Not because I gave up, but so I had a team exclusively focused on this – rather than relying on my AP team, which was juggling dozens of critical priorities at any given time.
The AP Worst Practice: Complexity That Looks Simple From the Outside
The electricity story is really a story about invisible complexity.
To a CFO, paying a utility bill is trivial. To an AP team managing hundreds of locations with multiple utilities per location, thousands of vendors, and manual payment reconciliation, it's an operational minefield. The gap between how leadership perceives a process and how that process actually functions is one of the most dangerous gaps in any finance organization.
When something fails visibly — the lights go out, a supplier calls screaming, a check gets lost, an invoice is never received — the instinct is to blame the team closest to the problem. But the team closest to the problem is usually managing a process that was never designed to scale. They're not failing. The system is.
The fix requires two things. First, honest acknowledgment that "simple" payments aren't simple at scale. Second, the right tools: automated payment matching, real-time confirmation that a payment was applied (not just sent), and centralized visibility across every account and location.
If the only way you know a payment failed is that the lights go out, you don't have an AP problem. You have a visibility problem.
AP Worst Practices is part of an ongoing series from the AP Institute. See all of our content here.
3 min
The CFO Had One Electricity Bill. We had 1,200.
By: Daniel Shore
"I've never had any issues paying my personal electricity bill," said the CFO of my former retail employer. "We're not cash poor. Why the hell can't we, as a company, pay our bills on time?"
And he was right. We weren't a struggling company. We weren't behind on payments. Our AP team was doing its job. And then one of our retail locations had its electricity shut off.
The utility company had mailed us a paper bill. We had cut a check. The check had been mailed. And somewhere in that chain, it was never cashed. Worse yet, none of us knew it was never cashed. We didn't know, the utility didn't know, the store manager, nobody. That is until the lights went off in the middle of a Tuesday.
I've never had any issues paying my personal electricity bill. Why the hell can't we, as a company, pay our bills on time?