Most finance teams already sense that manual invoice processing is slow and expensive. What’s harder to gauge from the inside is how big that gap is compared to teams that have actually automated it.
Ardent Partners answers that question every year with its State of ePayables report, a survey of AP and finance leaders now in its 20th edition. The 2025 report, based on responses from 204 professionals collected between March and May of that year, splits organizations into two groups: Best-in-Class, defined as the top 20% by processing cost and cycle time, and everyone else, which the report calls All Others. Comparing the two is the clearest picture available of what automation actually buys a finance team.
The cost difference alone is stark. All Others spend $12.42 to process a single invoice, all in: labor, software, overhead. Best-in-Class teams get that down to $2.65, a 79% reduction according to Ardent’s own calculation. Processing time follows the same pattern: 13.5 days from receipt to approval outside the top tier, versus 2.9 days for Best-in-Class, also roughly 79% faster. Neither gap closes on its own. Ardent ties both directly to how much of the intake, extraction, and approval workflow runs without someone re-keying data by hand.
The knock-on effects show up in two other metrics that matter just as much as cost and speed. Straight-through processing, meaning invoices that move from receipt to payment with no human touching them, sits at 29.0% for All Others. Best-in-Class teams reach 51.0%, nearly double, largely because they’ve enabled far more of their suppliers to submit invoices electronically in the first place. Exception rates move the other direction: All Others see 20.9% of invoices kick out for a missing PO, a coding error, or an approval bottleneck, while Best-in-Class teams cut that to 11.1%. Fewer exceptions means the ones that remain get more attention instead of getting rushed.
Exceptions are also close to the top of AP’s own list of frustrations. When Ardent asked respondents about their biggest operational challenges, the length of time it takes to approve invoices and payments came in first at 49%, with the high percentage of exceptions right behind at 48%. Fraud risk, which gets more attention in headlines, ranked further down at 31%. The order matters: the two problems AP teams actually feel day to day are speed and rework, not any single dramatic event.
None of this moves without automation, and the report is direct about that. Best-in-Class organizations aren’t winning through better staff or tighter policy alone. They’ve enabled 67.2% of their suppliers to submit invoices electronically versus 47.3% for All Others, and they lean far more heavily on automated routing, approval workflows, and OCR-based data capture. Teams still keying invoices in from PDFs and email attachments sit at the All Others end of every metric above, almost by definition, because that manual step is where the cost, the delay, and the exceptions all originate.
We built our own savings estimate using these same figures, so you can see roughly where your own invoice volume lands on this spectrum.
Source: Ardent Partners, “The State of ePayables 2025: AP’s Unfinished Journey”, based on a survey of 204 AP and finance professionals conducted March through May 2025. Figures reflect industry-wide research, not measured results from Clearline.