Going paperless in payables usually starts with a scanner and produces images nobody can act on. Building backwards, from the record outwards, means every step has somewhere to deliver when it arrives, and each stage delivers value on its own rather than waiting for the whole project to finish before anything improves.
Start with the record
Decide what an invoice record holds and which statuses exist, with an owner for each. Everything else feeds this. Skipping it produces images in one place and a tracking spreadsheet in another, which disagree within a month, and the spreadsheet quietly becomes the real system while the images become an archive.
Then the approvals
Move approvals off email onto the record, with the document visible at the point of decision and the approval captured with a name and a date. This delivers the largest reduction in elapsed time available, because approval waiting is where the days go, and it works while invoices are still arriving on paper.
Then capture, and the channels in parallel
With a record and an approval path in place, capture has somewhere to deliver and pays back immediately. Consolidating arrival channels is last in sequence and should start early in time, because it depends on suppliers and colleagues changing habits and takes a quarter or two regardless of what you have bought.
Questions people ask about paperless accounts payable process
Can we run hybrid?
Yes, and most should. Scanning at arrival with everything downstream digital captures most of the benefit while paper still exists.
What is the commonest mistake?
Buying capture first. It produces accurate data about the invoices that reached the system and nowhere to act on it.
Do we scan historical invoices?
Rarely worth it. Scan on demand when an old document is actually needed.