Buying cloud AP automation is buying a supplier into the middle of a finance process, and the questions that matter afterwards are the ones nobody asks during a demonstration. They are not about features. They are about what happens on a bad day: when you want to leave, when somebody joins or leaves, when the service is unavailable, and when a payment turns out to have been wrong.
Leaving
What does the export contain: field data only, or the original documents and the approval history too. In what format, how quickly, and at what cost. A provider who answers this crisply is telling you something good about how they think, and one who cannot is telling you something too. Ask before you sign rather than when you want to go.
Access and identity
Who can see what, how access is granted and removed, and whether removal is prompt when somebody leaves. Supplier bank details deserve particular attention, since visibility of them is a fraud consideration rather than a convenience one. These questions had implicit answers when records lived in an office and need explicit ones now.
Availability and support
What the uptime record actually is, not the target. How support is reached and by whom during your month end, which is when unavailability hurts most. And what the process is when a payment run has gone wrong, because that conversation is easier to have hypothetically than at the time.
Questions people ask about cloud ap automation
Is cloud less secure for payables?
Different rather than worse for most teams. The risks that materialise are access control and payment fraud, and those are your responsibility in any hosting model.
What if we need our data urgently?
That is exactly what the export question is for. Test the export during a trial rather than trusting a description of it.
Do we still need our own backups?
A periodic export you hold yourself is cheap insurance and it also proves the export works. Doing it quarterly is a reasonable default.