Every rollout meets resistance somewhere. I have never once implemented a new process without it. But over the years I have noticed the resistance you get from inside your own AP team is a genuinely different animal than the resistance you get from everyone else in the building, and treating them the same way is a mistake I have made more than once.

Inside your own team, the resistance is usually rooted in uncertainty about what the change means for them personally. Does this put my job on the line. Does this make my work harder for no real reason. And often there is a quieter layer underneath that, which is that the person pushing back may have been the one who built the old process in the first place. It made sense when they designed it. The business has changed since then, but nobody asked them to step back and reconsider it, so from where they sit, you are not fixing something broken, you are criticizing something they built in good faith. The way through that is not a memo. It is actually explaining why the change is happening and what it improves, before you flip the switch, so your team has a chance to understand the reasoning instead of just absorbing the outcome.

Resistance from outside your team looks different, and in my experience it is less about fear and more about trust and habit. Someone out in the business has been coding and stamping invoices the same way for years, because that is how they were taught, and that is how things got paid. They are not thinking about your new process because, frankly, accounts payable is not their job. They are focused on getting revenue in the door or keeping a warehouse running, and an email from accounting asking them to do something unfamiliar does not register as urgent. Often the resistance here is not resistance at all. It is just that people do not trust a new process until they have watched it actually work, and that trust has to be earned through results, not announced through a policy.

There is one more category worth naming honestly, which is the handful of people who will simply refuse to adopt whatever you roll out, no matter how well you explain it or how much proof you provide. You have to draw a line there, because the moment you make an exception for one person, you have quietly given permission for everyone else to opt out too, and your new process never actually becomes the process. That is a very different problem from genuine confusion or healthy skepticism, and it deserves a different response.

If you are rolling something out right now, the practical takeaway is simple. Do not treat every objection the same way. The person on your own team worried about their role needs reassurance and context. The person outside your team who has never seen this work before needs proof and patience. And the person who refuses regardless needs a clear line, held consistently. Mixing those up is how a good process gets watered down before it ever gets the chance to prove itself.

And if you are the one worried about how your suppliers will react to all of this, I would tell you the same thing I tell every CFO who asks. Do not be afraid of the change itself. You are not doing this to slow anyone down or make their life harder. You are doing it to get them paid faster and more reliably than before, and that is a message worth saying plainly and often, because it is true.