Touchless means an invoice reaching payment without a person handling it, and it is the headline claim in most automation marketing. The important thing about it is that its ceiling is not a property of any product. An invoice with no purchase order and no goods receipt has nothing to match against, so it needs a human by definition, whatever software you buy.
Measure your own ceiling first
Take last month's invoices and count how many had both a purchase order and a goods receipt recorded before the invoice arrived. That share is your ceiling. Every touchless claim you are shown should be read against it, and a vendor promising a figure above your ceiling is describing a different organisation's data rather than a capability you can buy.
Raising the ceiling is a process job
More invoices with orders behind them means more purchase-order discipline upstream, which is a policy and a habit rather than a product. Returning invoices without order references, setting a sensible threshold, and making goods receipts somebody's explicit job at the point of delivery are what move this number. All three are free.
What touchless still costs
Even at the ceiling, exceptions remain, and the invoices that fail are by definition the harder ones. A team processing a large share touchlessly is doing proportionally more difficult work per remaining invoice, so staffing does not fall in step with the percentage. Plan around the remaining work rather than around the headline share.
Questions people ask about touchless invoice processing
Is a high touchless rate always good?
It is good if the matching is genuinely correct. A high rate achieved with wide tolerances means differences are passing unexamined, which is a different thing from efficiency.
How do we increase it?
Increase purchase-order coverage and make goods receipts reliable. Software cannot match against documents that do not exist.
What about recurring invoices with no order?
Approve the arrangement once and match against it. That converts a repeated manual approval into a matched transaction without needing a purchase order each month.