Surprisingly simple accounts payable KPIs to measure for great results

This blog explores essential accounts payable reports and explains why they are useful. It also demonstrates how to use our custom reports functionality to measure this valuable information.

Key progress indicators to measure Accounts Payable Success

Each of the following accounts payable KPIs are commonly measured metrics that give vital insights into your performance. We’ll tell you how each can help you understand your accounts payable function and effectively use them to boost performance.

Days payable outstanding. 

See your average days payable outstanding (or days to pay) to see how you comply to regulations, and to assess operational efficiency.

Supplier spend analysis. 

Determine how much you spend with each vendor, and how often to keep track of spend, analyse your reliance on their product or services, and decide their priority level for queries, payments and more.

Duplicate payments.

Assess the accuracy of your ledger and discover where processes can improve for fewer invoice duplications and payment errors. It may be, for example, that you check all your transactions, or as many as you can, manually, and need to automate it with a system such as FISCALs.

Exception rates.

Measure your invoice to ledger accuracy and identify areas with higher exception rates. This KPI is helpful when cross-referenced against suppliers and staff members to find areas of input error.

Late payment rate versus invoices paid on time.

See how effective your accounts payable team are when paying invoices, and identify which suppliers take the longest to pay. Find out why you have problems paying these specific suppliers within terms and see where to develop your methodology or technology to help.

Payment error rate.

Discover how often errors, including duplicate payments and incorrect amounts, are made. Seeing where the most errors are made in your process and attributing the cause allows you to see where changes should be made to improve performance.

Invoices processed.

Measure how many invoices your team process per day or per FTE. Remember to benchmark this figure against teams with similar staff numbers or if you are tracking against each team member, to take into account their workload and which suppliers they cover. Some suppliers can be more demanding than others!