Most payables teams have a workflow process that has never been written down. It works, because the people doing it know how it works, and it fails in exactly the places nobody has articulated: the steps performed by whoever notices, the exceptions handled by whoever is asked, and the decisions made by convention. Writing it down takes a morning and usually finds three unowned steps.
Write it as who does what, not as what happens
A process written as passive steps hides ownership. Written as a named role doing a named action, it immediately exposes the steps where the answer is whoever notices. The goods receipt is nearly always one of those, and it is the step the whole three-way match depends on, which is why so many matching problems are really ownership problems.
Include the exceptions, which are most of the work
The clean path is easy to write and takes ten minutes. The value is in the branches: no purchase order, price mismatch, quantity mismatch, unrecognised supplier, disputed invoice, duplicate. Each needs an owner and a target. A process document that describes only the happy path describes the minority of the effort.
Then measure against it
Once written, the questions become answerable: how many invoices took each branch last month, how long each branch took, and which branch is growing. That turns process improvement into something evidence-led rather than a matter of opinion, and it makes it obvious whether your next problem is software or upstream discipline.
Questions people ask about accounts payable workflow process
How detailed should the document be?
Detailed enough that a new joiner could follow it, and short enough that somebody maintains it. Two or three pages covers most payables processes honestly.
Who should write it?
The people doing the work, reviewed by whoever owns the control. A process written only by management describes what should happen rather than what does.
How often should it be reviewed?
When something changes, and otherwise annually. A document that no longer matches practice is worse than none, because people stop trusting all of it.