SAP Business One gives growing businesses a joined-up system for purchasing, stock and finance. Yet many finance directors still find that supplier invoices take too long to process, and that the delays are hard to pin down.
The reason is that accounts payable in SAP Business One depends on several teams. Purchasing raises the order, the warehouse books the delivery, a budget holder approves the cost and finance posts the invoice. Every handover is a place where an invoice can wait. This article looks at the five places invoices get stuck most often and how to clear each one.
1. Before the invoice reaches finance
Supplier invoices land in the accounts mailbox, in buyers’ inboxes, with site managers or in the post. Until an invoice is in front of the accounts team, it does not exist as far as SAP Business One is concerned.
Why it matters: an invoice that sits in a buyer’s inbox for two weeks is two weeks closer to its due date before anyone has checked it.
How to clear it: give suppliers one address for invoices and capture everything from there. PaperLess Company Inbox picks up every emailed invoice automatically and starts processing it. Paper invoices are scanned into the same queue.
2. Keying the invoice in
Even with copy-from functions, someone still has to read the invoice, find the supplier, check the invoice number for duplicates and enter or confirm the amounts and VAT. For invoices that are not linked to a purchase order, every line needs coding.
Why it matters: manual entry is slow, and it is where typing errors and duplicate invoices slip in.
How to clear it: Automatic Invoice Recognition extracts header data from every invoice, and AI Multiline Recognition reads long, multi-page invoices line by line without templates. For more on this, see our guide to OCR invoice capture for SAP Business One.
3. Waiting for the goods receipt
When a company matches invoices against goods receipt POs, an invoice cannot be cleared until the warehouse has booked the delivery in SAP Business One. If goods were received but not booked, the invoice waits while finance chases the warehouse.
Why it matters: this is the most common hidden delay. Finance sees an invoice it cannot process, the warehouse does not know anyone is waiting, and the supplier is still owed money.
How to clear it: make goods receipt quick and visible. With PaperLess PO Requisition, deliveries can be received in PaperLess against pending purchase orders, which updates stock in SAP Business One. Reports on POs pending delivery show finance exactly which orders are holding up invoices.
4. Approval outside the system
SAP Business One has built-in approval procedures, with stages and templates that can require sign-off on purchasing documents. They work well for people who use SAP Business One every day. Budget holders, project managers and directors often do not, so approval of supplier invoices moves to email, printed copies and conversations in the corridor.
Why it matters: once approval leaves the system, nobody can see who has an invoice or for how long, and there is no reliable record of who signed off what.
How to clear it: PaperLess Invoice Approval routes invoices automatically by supplier, department, cost centre, project, nominal code and value. Approvers review and sign off in a web browser or on the mobile app, and the approval history can be looked up from the transaction in SAP Business One. Our article on streamlining invoice approvals with SAP Business One covers this in more detail.
5. Exceptions with no owner
An invoice that does not match its purchase order, because of a price change, a short delivery or a missing reference, needs a decision. Too often it sits with accounts, who cannot make the decision, while purchasing does not know it exists.
Why it matters: exceptions are a small share of invoices but take up a large share of the team’s time, and they are the ones most likely to be paid late.
How to clear it: let invoices that match go straight through, and send exceptions to the person who can resolve them. PaperLess PO matching posts matched invoices and closes the order automatically, and flags the rest for review. Mismatches can then be routed to the buyer or budget holder through an approval workflow.
How to find your own bottlenecks
Before changing anything, measure where invoices spend their time. For a sample of last month’s invoices, note four dates:
| Date | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Invoice date | When the supplier started the clock |
| Date received by accounts | How long capture takes |
| Date approved | How long approval takes |
| Date posted | How long matching and entry take |
The largest gap is your first bottleneck. In most SAP Business One businesses it is either capture or approval, because those are the steps that depend on people outside finance.
Want to see where your SAP Business One process could move faster? Book a free online demo, or read Closing the Books 50% Faster, our strategic guide for SAP Business One finance directors.
