Finance leaders are under pressure to reduce operating costs without sacrificing performance. Accounts payable is one of the most overlooked places to drive reductions. The function touches vendor relationships, payment timing, and spending data, all levers that directly impact the bottom line.
This post covers five actions AP teams can take immediately to start reducing company spend and start capturing value. For a deeper dive, check out our eBook How Accounts Payable Can Drive Company-Wide Cost Reductions.
5 Payables To-dos
1. Identify Your Top 20 Vendors by Spend
Pull a list of your top 20 vendors by spend. Check each contract for early payment discount terms. Many businesses have 2/10 net 30 terms buried in agreements they have never used.
For vendors without existing discount terms, flag high-volume candidates. These are ones to present to procurement or finance leadership as negotiation opportunities. AP has the payment history and volume data that makes the case for those conversations.
2. Map One Vendor Category for Consolidation
Map your vendors by category and look for redundancy. Multiple suppliers providing essentially the same product or service to different departments is common. Each carries separate contracts, pricing structures, and administrative overhead.
Start with something simple like office supplies. If three different departments are each ordering from a different supplier, pull the invoice history for all three, compare what each department is paying for similar items, and total up the combined spend. That combined number is the leverage procurement needs to negotiate better pricing with a single vendor. AP may not own that negotiation, but AP has the data that makes the opportunity visible and quantifiable.
3. Set Up Payment Deadline Alerts
Late payment fees are pure waste. They cost money, damage vendor relationships, and signal operational dysfunction. According to Atradius, half of all B2B invoices in the US are currently overdue. Avoiding penalties alone puts you ahead of the curve.
Identify vendors with strict late-fee enforcement policies and set up automated reminders for those payment deadlines. This is one area AP can own directly, and the fix eliminates the most common cause of late payments: simple oversight.
4. Run a Fiscal Quarter Through Spend Analysis
Transaction-level data tells you what happened. Patterns tell you what to expect. Pull one fiscal quarter of invoice data and categorize it by vendor, department, and purchase type.
Again, start simple. Look for things like seasonal spikes, rush order trends, and end-of-period surges. These patterns reveal planning gaps and negotiation opportunities that are invisible at the invoice level. Packaging these findings for procurement and finance leadership turns AP data into intelligence that other functions can act on.
5. Identify an Approval Bottleneck
Track where approvals stall in your current workflow, where exceptions pile up, and where the process creates unnecessary delays.
For example, when every purchase flows through the same approval chain regardless of dollar value, bottlenecks form at the top and gaps emerge at the bottom. A $500 purchase and a $50,000 purchase should obviously not require the same level of scrutiny.
AP pros can use approval data to support a case for tiered approval structure. Lower-dollar purchases move quickly through front-line approvers while larger commitments get reviewed by more senior employees.
AP pros are in a great position to make the case for a smarter structure.
Conclusion
Transforming AP into a cost-cutting function does not require a major initiative. It requires attention and incremental action. These five steps take minimal time and no additional budget. Early wins build credibility and fund the harder work that follows.
This post has been a way to get you started down the path of increasing the strategic value of your AP department. For more in-depth information. Check out our new guide:
Next Steps...
Go beyond efficiency gains and improve cashflow for the whole company. Read our free guide for an in-depth look.
How Accounts Payable Can Drive Company-Wide Cost Reductions
The chapters ahead offer a simple path with five interconnected strategies. Whether the goal is to make a stronger case for updated AP processes and technology, or if the goal is to elevate the perceived value of the AP function and position yourself as a strategically important contributor to the organization, these strategies provide the framework and the evidence to do both.
This guidebook presents a different approach—one that transforms accounts payable from administrative overhead into a source of measurable cost reduction and strategic value.
