The interesting differences cloud delivery makes to payables are not about hosting. They are about who can act on an invoice and from where, and who can see its state without asking somebody. Both attack elapsed time, which is where payables loses days, and neither appears as a line in a feature comparison.
Approvals stop waiting for a desk
The commonest cause of a late invoice is an approver who is travelling, on site or between meetings. When approval happens in a browser on a phone, that delay shrinks with no change to policy. It is the least glamorous benefit of cloud delivery and reliably the largest in daily operation.
A shared record removes informal traffic
Purchasing can see why an invoice is stuck without emailing payables. A site manager can confirm a delivery without a call. Much of the chatter around payables is people trying to establish one fact, and a shared record removes it. The cost is that access control becomes an explicit decision rather than a fact about the office.
What you now decide deliberately
Who sees supplier bank details, who can approve on whose behalf, and how access is removed when somebody leaves. These had implicit answers when records lived in a cabinet. A migration is the right moment to make them explicit, because nobody revisits an access model once it is in place.
Questions people ask about cloud based accounts payable
Is it less secure?
Different rather than worse for most finance teams. The risks that materialise are access control and payment fraud, and those are yours in any model.
What if the service is down?
Work waits, as with any outage. Ask for the actual uptime record rather than the target, and think about your month end specifically.
Can we get our data out?
Ask what the export contains, including documents and approval history, and test it during a trial.