Payables can be measured in dozens of ways and most of them either restate each other or measure a decision somebody else made. Four metrics between them describe how the function is actually running, and one very popular metric mostly describes your payment policy rather than your process, which is worth knowing before it appears on a scorecard.
The queue by state, and the oldest age
How many invoices sit at each stage, and how long the oldest in each has been there. Together these show where work is accumulating this week and where the reputational risk is. They take minutes to produce and they are the two numbers a payables manager should look at most often.
The clean match share and the exception mix
What proportion of invoices cleared the match without human intervention, and what the failures were caused by. The first measures the health of the whole cycle; the second says which upstream problem to attack. Both are partly measures of other departments, which should be stated when they are reported rather than left implicit.
Why days payable outstanding is a poor process metric
It blends deliberate payment policy with process failure. An organisation paying to sixty-day terms and one that is thirty days late on thirty-day terms can produce similar figures with completely different causes. It is a useful cash measure for finance and a misleading operational one for payables.
Questions people ask about accounts payable metrics
What about cost per invoice?
Useful for a business case if you measure it yourself, and misleading if you take it from an industry average. It also varies enormously with the exception mix.
Should we track invoices per person?
Only alongside the exception mix, since a team handling harder invoices will process fewer and be doing more work.
How often should these be reviewed?
Queue and age weekly, match share and exception mix monthly. That rhythm catches problems while they are small.