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In today’s climate, many Accounts Payable (AP) teams find themselves squeezed from all directions. Budgets are shrinking. Headcount is static — or worse, declining. Expectations, however, continue to rise.
You’re not alone if you’re feeling the strain. Whether you’re leading a lean team or managing a three-person process solo, the balancing act between accuracy, efficiency, and resilience has never been more difficult.
At the same time:
- Errors, fraud, and late payments haven’t gone away.
- Compliance requirements are getting tougher.
- The organisation still expects high performance, fast reporting, and confident control.
Yet many AP teams are stepping up.
Instead of only focusing on cost-cutting, they prioritise effectively, automate the right tasks, and build resilience into every corner of their processes.
This blog shares prioritisation tips, gives advice on navigating internal pressures, and speaks on building a leaner, more resilient AP operation.
How to prioritise: What to cut, what to protect
When resources are tight and headcount is down, the instinct can be to freeze all spending and stop improvement work. To shift everything to “survival mode.” While some of that will be applicable to you, it’s also an opportunity for change and growth within the team.
The key is: Instead of cutting elements broadly, cut smart. Protect the essentials, automate and delegate where appropriate, optimise processes, and drop what you don’t need.
Start with a risk-value matrix
Map every AP task against two questions:
- What value does this task deliver to the business? (For example: financial savings, risk reduction, supplier satisfaction.)
- What is the cost or risk of it going wrong or not being completed? (Is it an operational essential, or does not doing it risk fraud or regulatory issues? The more it costs the business if incomplete, the more important the task.)
Use this to group activities into four categories: Critical, important, less important, and non-essential. Here are the characteristics of each task, and what to do with them:
Priority | Characteristics | What to do |
Critical | High value, high risk if neglected. For example, fraud checks, payment approvals, making the payments. | Protect at all costs. Don’t cut. If possible, automate. |
Important | Medium value, some risk. For example, early payment discounts, supplier statement reconciliation. | Streamline or automate. |
Less important | Low value, low risk. For example, manual logging, status chasers. | Automate, delegate or pause. |
Non-essential | No meaningful value, and minimal impact if skipped | Eliminate. |
Still not sure how important a task is?
Ask yourself: Does this align with our key goals in the business/ function? The less it aligns, the less important the task is.
Prioritise for impact, AND urgency
Be wary of focusing only on tasks that feel urgent, like processing invoices under pressure. These may keep things moving day to day. But strategic risk management, like detecting duplicates or blocked payments, is where a proactive approach that creates time and cost savings shines. This type of risk could hinder your team further along in their process, so it may be more important than you think.
Think about whether the task only puts out fires (like recovery audits) or prevents them, and what you can do earlier, that will pay off later.
Tactics to help you choose wisely:
- Use data analytics to identify where errors and delays cost the most.
- Talk to your team — they often know what’s low-value but time-consuming.
- Be transparent with stakeholders. Show the trade-offs if budgets are cut too deep.
Here are a few areas where you need to consider carefully, where issues are more expensive to fix than to prevent:
- Fraud prevention and compliance. The costs of fraud go far beyond financial loss, impacting reputation and staff confidence.
- Supplier trust and communication. Lower levels of supplier communication can cause a rift in the relationship, which is difficult to manage. Loss of trust, especially in relation to late payment, can mean that your organisation misses out on favourable terms.
- Data accuracy. Lower accuracy means less reliable data. That equals more mistakes, and thus higher costs.
- Continuous improvement and automation initiatives. Automation is a helping hand for many teams for efficiency and workload reduction, which in turn creates more cost-effective (and less stressed) teams.
Cutting these areas today can create much bigger fires tomorrow. Don’t risk that, especially if keeping up with compliance and regulations and maintaining standards are your biggest priorities.
Embrace smart automation – Especially if it pays for itself
In our risk-value matrix above, we shared that tasks could be automated to save resources, making it far easier and faster for the team to complete daily work.
However, we know that automation costs money, and given that you’re doing more with less, it’s safe to assume that budget may be an issue. So here’s the key:
Automation that will deliver clear savings across multiple areas can pay for itself. An example of this is finding cash you’ve previously lost, for example, a recovery audit solution. Another way is to reduce a time-consuming or costly process, like statement reconciliation. Or it could be by taking a proactive approach to fix issues that could cause mayhem further along, like stopping a duplicate invoice so recovery becomes unnecessary later. It becomes a saviour, a way to transform processes to save precious time and money.
Quick tip: If you aim to automate, executive buy-in is key. When speaking to them, ensure they understand the scale of the potential benefits it can bring, and include estimated figures based on similar companies to compare against. The C-suite needs hard facts and evidence to make decisions that will shape the organisation.
Building a lean, resilient finance team
With around 44% of AP comprising 10 or fewer full-time staff, lean teams are prolific in finance. – PPN Survey 2025
Having a resilient team means they can bounce back from setbacks, adapt to changing circumstances, and maintain performance in the face of adversity. Across sectors, with economic issues tightening budgets all around and teams becoming leaner, it’s becoming increasingly important.
Consider the following when building your team:
The skills gap
As job roles change and technology moves forward, it creates a discrepancy between the skills required for the job and those possessed by your team. In the PPN survey 2025, 30% of respondents said the skills gap was an issue. This can lead to lower-than-expected productivity and uneven workloads. If you’re hiring, the skills gap makes it harder to find suitable employees.
The solution is to ensure the team is correctly trained in all the technology they use. Whether this is in best practice for AI prompts, effective use of the ERP, or simply which keyboard shortcuts to use to save time, all training makes a difference when it comes to productivity and effectiveness.
Make it a point to cross-train team members. While they will each have a specific function to perform, there may be times when another team member is on annual leave or unexpectedly away from the business. Your team needs to be able to function without them, or risk late payments and more.
Processes
While we discuss functioning regardless of difficulties, another key area to consider is process. It is particularly important that the entire team can perform processes with the same easily accessible method. Therefore, all processes need to be standardised and well-documented throughout. This enables any team member to pick up where another left off easily or review the process easily if there is an issue.
Analysis
Always make time for process and behaviour analysis. Keep the company goals and related KPIs in mind and order them in importance according to those goals. As a result, you can clearly see what is and isn’t working and then focus on improving what matters the most to the business.
Fostering resilience in your team
Team spirit and collaboration are key to fostering resilience. With that in mind, there are several areas where this can be fostered.
Involve the team in key decisions. If you don’t involve people and ask their opinion in something that will clearly involve them, they will feel blindsided. So, ask their opinion about important topics, involve them in the selection of new technology, and show them you’ve listened by implementing what they voted for, or acknowledging who thought of an idea.
Celebrate wins. Whether the individual or team wins, acknowledging and celebrating them is extremely powerful. Show you have faith in the team and their abilities, and that you recognise their strengths.
Show their impact. Share vital information, including dashboards and graphs, so the team can assess their performance. This brings a sense of empowerment, especially if they are doing well with a new responsibility.
Encourage teamwork and fun. Part of what makes a team work well together is when they know and like each other. So don’t let it all be work, work, work. Let them joke, discuss their lives and likes, and encourage sitting together. The stronger the bond, the more the team does for each other, and the better their collaboration will be. That collaboration and coming together as a team is precisely what resilience looks like.
Balancing team needs and leadership expectations
In times of resource scarcity and high workload, taking care of your team is even more important. Leaders need to ease the possibility of burnout or risk the team collapsing under the pressure to perform. This must also be considered when planning which tasks need to be automated or de-prioritised.
If you automate, there will be new pressures to contend with. Processes to amend or create, responsibilities to distribute, and new technology to learn.
Each person is different, responding to change and time pressures in their own way. Lead with empathy and understanding of their needs, supporting morale and encouraging growth.
Be transparent and communicate clearly to help reduce tensions. Show the data where possible to support your decisions and be open about the trade-offs and risks incurred when you cut tasks or spend. Also, be upfront about how you intend to deal with these issues. If it’s clear that the team will be stressed, share how you plan to combat that.
With empathy, a clear goal, and transparency, teams will trust that you will support them.
Leadership in lean times
Turbulent times when resource is limited can be extremely tough, but this is your chance to use it as an opportunity for yourself and your team.
It’s an occasion to rethink the status quo and truly understand how your processes work. To trim the fat from bloated or outdated practices. To rethink how the team works in a way that will help, not hinder. To champion digital transformation and utilise technology in ways you haven’t done before. Finally, it’s an opportunity to build your team’s reputation and trust with executives through proactive, thoughtful changes.
One of those proactive changes could be automating your risk management to streamline checks before payments and reduce the need for recoveries and recovery audits.
