Accounts Payable (AP) automation tools streamline the accounts payable process, offering benefits beyond automation like improved efficiency, better control, and enhanced visibility of the overall financial process.
AP automation tools save time and reduce costs while also improving accuracy and providing comprehensive dashboards for better insights. They enhance data accessibility, give you more control over cash flow, and strengthen fraud protection.
Geekflare has researched and compiled the best accounts payable automation tools to help businesses choose the right solution based on key features such as optimizing payments, handling reimbursements, and automating OCR data extraction.
- Bill AP – Best for Streamlined Invoicing and Payments
- Payhawk – Best for Growing Businesses With Integrated Expenses
- Melio – Best for Small Businesses
- Kanverse AI – AI-Powered Document Processing
- Tipalti – Best for High-Volume Global Payments
- Airbase – Best for Spend Management and Approvals
- Corpay One – Best for Medium Business
- Concur – Best for Travel and Expense Integration
- Pipefy – Best for Customizable AP Workflows
- Stampli – Best for ERP Integration
- Spendesk – Best for Spend Control and Expense Tracking
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Bill AP
Best for Streamlined Invoicing and Payments
Bill AP helps businesses streamline their invoicing, bill creation, and payment processes, helping them get paid faster. It is suitable for businesses of all sizes and accounting firms.
Automate your accounts payable process, digitize paper-based payables, and capture invoices from email with BIll AP for a complete view and control of your payables.
Bill AP allows you to customize the approval policies, approve bills from any place, and automate approval workflows with a simple swipe or a few steps. It offers a variety of payment options, including credit cards, cheques, international wire, ePayments, and more.
Track both incoming and outgoing payments with a dashboard view that shows all stats; direct data integration or two-way sync with the Bill AP can save time and effort by eliminating manual entry.
Bill AP Pros
Offer a 1-month free trial
Easy to set up the approval process
AI recognition in invoicing
Centralized payment management
Bill AP Cons
No automation when you re-assign the invoices
The reporting feature needs improvement
Bill AP Pricing
The starting price of Bill AP is $45/month. Based on the numbers, you’ll get an additional discount of 10-20% on client subscriptions. It also offers a free plan for you and for your clients.
Payhawk
Best for Growing Businesses With Integrated Expenses
Payhawk provides sophisticated and user-friendly accounts payable and invoice management software designed to help your organization manage and handle invoices effectively. Companies can optimize payment methods, handle reimbursements, and oversee invoicing on a larger scale through its centralized platform.
The complete invoicing process can be automated using OCR data extraction and machine learning. Payhawk allows to extract and combine data from invoices in more than 60 languages while digitizing bookkeeping.
Payhawk’s invoice management software enhances efficiency by saving over two hours per day via the automation of financial procedures. It ensures audit preparedness by storing an audit trail and relevant expense information.
Payhawk offers a paperless accounting process, adhering to local tax regulations and enabling effortless expense archiving. The software presents seamless integrations with most of the popular business tools, including popular accounting software like FreshBooks and Quickbooks, enhancing productivity among the finance team.
Payhawk streamlines businesses’ management and payment of invoices with customized approval workflows, multi-level approval chains, and overdue invoice reports. It guarantees security by carrying out intelligent verifications to mitigate the risk of fraud or inaccurate spending.
Payhawk Pros
Provides multilingual support and a live chat option
Offers cashback when you spend from your card
User-friendly and intuitive interface
Provides a broader view of all the expenses
Payhawk Cons
Non-card expense tracking is only available in higher plans
Features like purchase order generation and 3-way matching are paid add-ons.
Payhawk Pricing
Payhawk offers three pricing tiers, which can be viewed after requesting a demo to understand the features and usage.
Melio
Best for Small Businesses
Melio offers a flexible payment method for invoices, allowing customers to pay with a card (with a 2.9% fee) or ACH bank transfer for free. This helps enhance cash flow and eliminates heavy paperwork.
With Melio, you can easily pay invoices and business expenses online, and vendors can receive instant direct deposits or paper checks without signing up. Multiple payments can be processed at once, saving time and earning reward points when paying by credit card.
Melio allows for approval workflows to set roles and responsibilities for payment permissions, making it easier to directly pay business bills from any device. Additionally, it allows for hassle-free international payments.
Melio allows you to sync your accounting software with FreshBooks, QuickBooks, and more to simplify taxes and bookkeeping. It also enables you to split bills into different payment methods and options for flexibility. Just create an account, upload bills or invoices, make payments, and choose how vendors are paid.
Melio Pros
Automates bill capture
You can send ACH transfers for free
Earn cashback and points on using credit cards for payments
Offers approval workflows, easy bill capture, payment tracking, and more included in every account
Melio Cons
Charges $20 for faster check processing
Charges 2.9% of the payment amount when you pay using your card
Melio Pricing
Melio offers a pricing plan with free features like accounting software sync, approval workflows, data and form export, bill management, and more. It only charges for some add-on services like instant transfer, fast check, international payment, fast ACH transfer, and more.
Kanverse AI
AI-Powered Document Processing
Kanverse is an AI-powered zero-touch Intelligent document processing platform, with its flagship product being Kanverse AP Invoice Automation. Its Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) cuts short processing times and prevents fraud while delivering up to 99.5% processing accuracy without any manual input.
Kanverse AI can handle various accounts payable automation tasks, including processing invoices, PO matching, payment requests, and more, without the need for templates. It can also fetch invoices from different channels like email and SharePoint.
Kanverse is a collaboration-friendly platform that allows teamwork within the team and across the business enterprise. It offers an operations dashboard with key AP insights, a self-service portal for vendors to submit and track invoices, and easy access to support for queries.
Kanverse’s allows users to approve and process invoices individually or in batches. It also keeps a business updated about the invoice payment status. It has an advanced set of business rules to auto-verify and validate the extracted data. However, one can also create and deploy custom business rules best fit for their individual workflows with its low code process automation.
Kanverse’s AP automation utility helps your business remain compliant with global privacy laws by protecting personally identifiable information (PII). It does so by blurring out sensitive data from the invoice processing personnel. Besides, its AI-powered fraud detection helps an organization stay secure from AP scams such as forged checks, multiple payments, and ACH fraud.
Kanverse AI Pros
Up to 80% reduction in costs due to payment automation.
99.5% processing extraction efficiency.
Fraud prevention and data privacy.
Kanverse AI Cons
AI-powered invoice processing can lead to inaccuracies without human oversight.
Requires training for employees to use effectively
Kanverse AI Pricing
Kanverse AI provides custom pricing options along with a free trial.
Tipalti
Best for High-Volume Global Payments
Tipalti is a smart accounts payable tool that streamlines and automates business processes, allowing for greater efficiency and scalability. It enables businesses to focus on growth while Tipalti handles the administrative tasks.
Tipalti helps streamline the payable cycle, reducing workload, speeding up financial closures, and minimizing payment errors. It modernizes financial operations by automating manual payable processes. Tipalti can also integrate with payroll accounting to automate employee payments, ensuring accurate and timely payroll alongside other financial transactions.
Get complete control and visibility of your business and experience efficiency in every account. No need to add any further resources; scale rapidly with the Tipalti AP automation tool and strengthen your financial controls to reduce compliance risk.
Tipalti offers real-time insight, can reduce your workload from manual invoicing, and go for a touchless invoice solution with advanced approvals, PO matching, and machine learning technology. In addition, execute the payments in a variety of methods and currencies across the globe.
Easily manage payment approvals, detect frauds, and make instant payments without hassle. Ensure global compliance and operations across all the subsidiaries and entities with an HQ view. Tipalti also provides enterprise-grade financial controls and ensures compliance with KPMG-approved tax engines.
Tipalti Pros
Hassle-free vendor onboarding
Integration with QuickBooks Online is a bonus
Provides automation for payment processes
Quick and easy payee ID creation
Tipalti Cons
Limited customization option
Slow customer support response
Unable to download multiple invoices at a time
Tipalti Pricing
The price of Tipalti is starting at $99/month. You’ll get a custom pricing option that fits your business requirements.
Airbase
Best for Spend Management and Approvals
Airbase’s Accounting Automation improves accuracy and saves time by automating the entire lifecycle of transactions, from approval to receipt capture, bill creation, and syncing to the GL. It also includes automated receipt compliance enforcement.
Airbase integrates with Xero, QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online, Oracle NetSuite, and Sage Intacct so that it can sync virtual cards to your GL automatically during the transaction. The other transactions can easily be synced to the GL after a single payment.
Airbase allows you to set settings and rules based on your preferences. It learns from your transactions to make intelligent recommendations for the next one. Auto-categorization updates GL fields for physical card transactions based on past entries, including category, line tags, transaction tags, and vendor.
Set your contract start and end dates for amortization schedules. If you are a NetSuite user, you can take advantage of the deep integrations by choosing from various amortization templates for complex flows. So, automate your low-value tasks and start focusing on the high-value strategic ways.
Airbase Pros
Automates routing and approval workflows, payment flow, and entering multiple categories
Automatic invoice scanning and adding details
Imports receipts easily from a mobile application
Integrates with General Ledger (GL)
Airbase Cons
No free plan and trial
Lack of features for larger companies
Airbase Pricing
Airbase gives you quotes tailored to your needs, problems, goals, and priorities. You can also schedule a demo to know whether it can work for your company.
Corpay One
Best for Medium Business
Corpay One automates business bill payments, offering various payment options such as ACH, checks, credit cards, and Corpay Mastercard to streamline the process and improve cash flow.
When you make payments with Corpay One’s automated account payable tool, you will get a better way of receiving, approving, and tracking bills. It scans the whole document automatically and lets you easily upload invoices, bills, and receipts.
Customize each step from approval flows to the bill categorization with Corpay One. It integrates with QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online to sync payments to the accounting system, hence, less manual entry and fewer errors.
Whenever you make a payment from Corpay Mastercard, you will get a 1.5% rebate with no annual fee and a 1% rebate on other purchases. You can set custom spend controls for your team for free.
Corpay One provides money laundering and fraud detection to secure your information. It has the highest security standards and identity verification to protect your account and vendors’ information.
Corpay One Pros
Customized workflows
Easy-to-send international payments from the app
Cost-effective way to send ACHs quickly
Reliable tool for businesses for greater functionality and consistent performance
Corpay One Cons
A steep learning curve for beginners
Limited analytics affecting businesses during decision-making
Charges extra for international wire transfers or payment errors
Corpay One Pricing
The starting price of Corpay One is $149/account. You can use it for free.
Concur
Best for Travel and Expense Integration
Concur’s automated accounts payable solution simplifies the process of managing and paying invoices, resulting in cost and time savings, decreased errors, and improved organization. It offers a solution for automating the account payable process, providing resources and best practices to help identify and address breakdowns in the process.
Concur uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to capture invoices electronically. You will get easy-to-use mobile and web-based applications that help you streamline your payable processes. It also integrates with an accounting system or ERP to sync data quickly.
Pipefy Pros
Capture expenses using mobile app screenshots
Automated expense report filing
Integrates easily with SAP systems and Banks
Provides unique solutions for managing travel expenses, reducing unnecessary spending on travel
Pipefy Cons
Sometimes, navigation slows down
User reporting functionality could have been better
Concur Pricing
Concur requires you to request a quote by filling out the form to get the best price for your business based on your goals, problems, and usage.
Pipefy
Best for Customizable AP Workflows
Pipefy provides intelligent workflows for efficient finance teams to achieve better outcomes. Get complete visibility of the operations at a glance and automate your work with approvers, vendors, and colleagues on its cloud platform for a better finance process.
Manage a single communication flow with all your stakeholders and automatically update all the statuses through email or a customer portal. With Pipefy, there are negligible chances of errors in your payment processes.
Integrate Pipefy with your financial tools, such as spreadsheets and ERP, to get a better outcome. Additionally, you can measure, control, and enhance your numbers, from each department’s monthly spending to the complete PO cycle time, with Pipefy’s customizable dashboards.
No need to write a single line of code; tailor Pipefy according to your needs and simplify your account payable process. Gain efficiency and better results by optimizing the finance process and easily monitor your operation on your screen.
Pipefy Pros
Provides advanced customization
Offers higher storage and database limits
A custom email domain is a plus
The base plan includes access to its API
Pipefy Cons
No data recovery in the starter plan
Necessary security features are not available in basic plans, such as two-factor authentication, single sign-on, white label, etc.
Pipefy Pricing
Pipefy offers a Free plan for small businesses. You’ll have to contact the sales team bigger requirements.
Stampli
Best for ERP Integration
Stampli is a smart accounts payable automation platform that integrates invoice and bill processing, communication, payment options, and credit card management in one convenient system.
Stampli AP provides visibility and control over corporate spending, allowing AP departments to communicate better with vendors, stakeholders, and approvers involved in approvals and purchases.
Streamline all your financial processes 5 times faster. Stampli uses Artificial Intelligence technology to automate AP invoice processing and learn your unique patterns to automate approval notifications, simplify GL coding, identity duplicates, and more.
Stampli provides a platform for businesses to easily track and manage their bill activities, ownership, and statuses with real-time invoice capture and coding, promoting accountability and transparency. It also helps businesses scale and adapt to change.
Stampli’s easy-to-use interface allows you to manage your payment processes from any device, anywhere, at any time. It has various capabilities, such as smart AP processing, segregation of duties, full visibility, fast implementation, payment agnostic, and more.
Stampli Pros
Route invoices precisely using its AI
Gives reminders when something needs to be approved
Scans invoices to give you all the details
Excellent customer support
Stampli Cons
Time-taking synchronization process
The flexible pricing option is missing
Stampli Pricing
Stampli allows you to request a quote by filling out the form to get a better pricing estimation for your business.
Spendesk
Best for Spend Control and Expense Tracking
Spendesk automates expense account allocation, VAT extraction, and receipt reconciliation to reduce time spent on month-end closing and minimize errors in payment information management.
Spendesk ensures data accuracy and automates your business payment processes thanks to its OCR and pre-setting options. No need to ask for the receipt from your finance team again and again. Find all the receipts in one place.
Spendesk allows you to integrate your accounting software, such as Datev, Sage, NetSuite, and Xero, for easy data syncing and management. It also sends automatic reminders to your team for payment and receipt tracking and enables you to map expenses with custom payment categories to save time.
Spendesk offers tools to help teams manage and track transactions, export them to accounting software, and verify information through Expense Inbox. It aims to improve spending efficiency and accountability for organizations.
Spendesk Pros
Cloud-based functionality for quick access from anywhere, anytime
Provides a better view of your expenses and follow-ups
Offers virtual cards
Travel and HR integrations are a bonus
Spendesk Cons
Open API access only in the highest plan
No spend dashboards in the Essential (basic) plan
Spendesk Pricing
Spendesk allows you to take a demo of any plan you decide for your business and understand which works best for your business.
What is Automated Accounts Payable Software?
Automated Accounts Payable software is a tool that handles your financial transactions from the beginning to the end. Whenever you receive invoices and bills, you must be aware of clearing all the amounts within the given period.
Automated accounts payable software helps businesses pay their bills on time through various payment methods, reducing errors and improving trust with suppliers and vendors. It digitizes the supplier/vendor invoice and bill process to create leaner, cost-effective, and faster workflows. Thus, no manual forwardings, no cutting paper checks, and no paper receipts anymore.
AP automation software saves time, improves accuracy, enhances insight and transparency, saves unnecessary expenses, offers fraud detection, low-cost data preservation, easy auditing, early payment discounts, and integrates with existing accounting software.
What are the Benefits of Using Automated Accounts Payable Tools?
The 4 benefits of using cash flow automation have been elaborated upon below.
- Streamlines Transactions: Automated accounts payable tools help manage invoices efficiently and prevent missing any transactions, leading to improved cash flow and business growth.
- Financial Forecasts: Automated AP tools generate smarter data that is not going to come with manual cash flow. It collects data and assists you with the right insights so that you know what is happening in your cash cycle. With the correct insights, you can make smarter decisions for your business.
- Cash Flow Visibility: The accounts payable department is crucial for automated cash flow management in a company. Automation helps improve the visibility of accounts and maintain records through accounts payable software.
- Less Processing Fees: Manual cash flow processes can be time-consuming and lead to late payments. Automated accounts payable tools integrate with invoicing software and help speed up invoice processing and can also save on transaction fees through reward programs.