Finance Software

The Top 10 Accounts Payable Solutions

Discover the top accounts payable solutions for business. Explore features such as invoice management, compliance and audit visibility, and payment automation.

Last updated on Jun 27, 2024

Written by Caitlin Harris

Technical review by Laura Iannini

The Top 10 Accounts Payable Solutions include:

1. Airbase
2. Bill.com
3. FreshBooks
4. Intuit QuickBooks
5. Lightyear
6. Rossum
7. Sage Intacct
8. SAP Concur
9. Tipalti
10. Xero

Accounts payable solutions, also known as accounts payable automation solutions, streamline the process of tracking and managing your organization’s vendor or supplier invoices and other expenses. They offer a single, central platform from which finance teams can manage invoices and access related documents. They also automate many of the manual and administrative processes involved with accounts payable management, including invoice validation, data entry, invoice approval, and payment processing.

Managing your accounts payable process is critical to ensuring that you’re paying your suppliers in a timely manner, fostering a positive reputation with your stakeholders, and monitoring your organization’s cash flow. By implementing an accounts payable solution—and leveraging the powerful automation and reporting capabilities that come with it—, finance teams can focus on developing cost-saving initiatives and business growth strategies, reduce the risk of human error and fraud, more easily keep on top of their cash flow, and ensure compliance with financial regulations and data protection standards.

In this article, we’ll explore the top accounts payable solutions designed to help you better manage your organization’s spending. We’ll highlight the key use cases and features of each solution, including invoice management, compliance and audit visibility, and payment automation.

Airbase

Airbase is an accounts payable automation solution that makes it easier for organizations to automate their accounts payable, software-enabled corporate cards, and employee expense reimbursements via a single platform. Airbase is designed to help accounting teams better manage their business’ spending to gain deeper insights into their cash flow and reduce wasted spend.

Airbase automates payment transactions by implementing workflows and approval routing processes. The platform automatically codes, tags, and records transactions in the general ledger so that teams don’t have to do it manually, thereby mitigating the risk of human error. The Invoice Inbox feature ensures that all invoice data is filed in one location, automatically pulling in data from other sources such as email correspondence to save teams time spent looking for specific details. Airbase supports payments via ACH, card, check, vendor credit, and international wire, providing one platform for tracking different payment types. Airbase also generates real-time reports to help teams stay on top of their cash flow, including banking activity reports that show individual transactions for easier month-end reconciliation. Finally, vendors can log into the Airbase Vendor Portal to input their company and bank details and track their own payments.

Airbase integrates natively with QuickBooks, Xero, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite, making it easier for businesses to keep track of what they’re paying via one portal. It also supports domestic and international payments—meaning payments can be made in USD or the vendor’s local currency—making it a popular option for businesses with a large percentage of suppliers that are based abroad. We recommend Airbase to SMBs looking for a user-friendly, intuitive platform to help them automate their non-payroll spending, so they can spend less time on administration and more time helping the business grow.

Bill.com

BILL is an accounting automation and digitization software provider that helps small- to midsized businesses simplify their financial processes. Their flagship solution automates invoice processing and the processes of sending and receiving payments, as well as syncing with popular accounting systems to provide deeper insights into a company’s financial operations. It also offers deep insights into workflows and cash flows, thereby helping businesses better manage their spending.

BILL enables accounting teams to import invoices manually or via CVS templates or email to reduce the amount of manual data entry they have to carry out. The platform encrypts this data and syncs it between BILL and any existing accounting software or financial process tools, including FreshBooks, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, and QuickBooks. This makes it easy for teams to reconcile their accounts and create one holistic overview of their AP processes, without having to manually enter data multiple times. BILL supports payment via ACH, virtual cards, and international wire transfers, simplifying international payments in multiple currencies. Finally, all payment-related activities are automatically recorded, creating a comprehensive audit trail for compliance purposes.

BILL is a cloud-based solution, making it simple to deploy and highly scalable, enabling the platform to grow to support your business growth. The fact that all documents are hosted in one cloud location also makes it easy for authorized team members to access any information they need from any location, on any device. Because of this, we recommend BILL as a strong solution for SMBs looking to automate their accounts payable and manage their cash flow remotely.

FreshBooks

FreshBooks is an accounting and bookkeeping solution designed to help small businesses keep track of their finances. As well as accounts payable tools, FreshBooks offers invoicing automation and template creation, time tracking, and robust reporting features. They also offer a mobile app, which enables accounting teams to take care of their payments from anywhere, on any device.

FreshBooks’ cloud-hosted platform makes it easy for teams to track their expenses in line with their budget. The solution automatically imports expenses—including multi-currency expenses—from synced bank accounts every day. This ensures that teams are always working with the most current data. In addition to this, authorized persons can upload receipt images and add them to expenses. From the central dashboard, teams can easily access useful reports such as profit and loss, VAT returns and sales tax summaries. Reports can be filtered by client, team member or date, and saved, exported, or printed for ease of sharing. This robust functionality makes it much easier for teams to keep on top of auditing and compliance requirements, including MTD for VAT.

As well as enabling internal accounting teams to take control of their business’ finances, FreshBooks enables admins to set permissions for contractors and external accountants to access data if needed. FreshBooks offers webinar Q&As, as well as telephone support from 8am-8pm EST, and takes pride in connecting every support call to a human representative, rather than an automated system. We recommend FreshBooks as an intuitive accounts payable solution for SMBs looking to simplify their payment processes and make better financial decisions.

Intuit QuickBooks

Intuit is a provider of market-leading accounting and finance software designed for both consumers and businesses use. QuickBooks is Intuit’s flagship accounting solution that helps SMBs track their income and expenses to manage their cash flow. QuickBooks is available in four plans: Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced.

QuickBooks helps accounting teams keep track of their accounts payable via one central dashboard. Teams can make payments directly through QuickBooks via bank transfer, debit/credit card, paper check, or schedule payments in advance. All transactions are synced with existing bank accounts and payment gateways, such as PayPal, and automatically recorded for ease of auditing. Teams can also postpone payments to adjust their cash reserves. With QuickBooks Advanced, teams can leverage integrated analytics tools from Fathom to track KPIs and make better financial decisions to encourage business growth. These analyses can be exported as visual reports. The Advanced plan also offers workflow automation, which enables teams to schedule payment reminders to ensure they don’t default. It also offers security features; role-based access controls ensure only authorized personnel can access sensitive financial data, and continuous backups enable teams to restore financial data to a specific date and time in the event of data loss, or quickly roll back changes to undo mistakes.

Customers praise QuickBooks for its user-friendly interface and useful API integrations. We recommend QuickBooks Advanced as a strong option for mid-sized businesses looking to better manage their payments and improve their strategic financial decision making. For smaller businesses on a tighter budget looking for a reliable, easy-to-use account payable solution, we recommend the Essentials package.

Lightyear

Lightyear is an accounting software provider that specializes in bookkeeping, purchasing, and approval automation. Their intuitive cloud platform enables organizations to streamline their account payable processes, whilst providing real-time insights into payables data that enables organizations to make better-informed forecasting and cash flow decisions.

With its intelligent data extraction feature, Lightyear’s flagship platform extracts the line-item data from invoices, credit notes, statements, and receipts, eliminating the need for manual data entry. Admins can set automation rules for GL coding, tracking categories, and supplier tax rates based on supplier- or invoice-specific criteria, making it easier for finance teams to keep on top of their bookkeeping. Once invoices have been uploaded, the platform compares product codes with each supplier’s price list—helping to identify overcharging—and it automatically three-way matches purchase orders. Lightyear also helps streamline the approvals process, enabling businesses to automatically carry out up to five levels of approval for added security.

Lightyear offers in-built integrations with multiple accounting, ERP, and inventory solutions via their cloud API. This makes the platform relatively straightforward to deploy, but it also streamlines ongoing management by eliminating the need to carry data across siloed solutions. Overall, we recommend Lightyear as a strong solution for mid-market organizations and larger enterprises looking to automate their accounts payable, data extraction, purchasing, and bookkeeping processes.

Rossum

Rossum is an intelligent document processing platform that enables organizations to automate and streamline many of the manual tasks associated with data extraction and processing. The low-code platform can be used as an end-to-end account payable automation solution that accurately captures and validates invoices, reducing time spent on data entry so that finance teams can focus on strategic planning and growth.

Rossum’s AI-powered document processing engine uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to “read” invoices, extracting and entering data automatically and reducing the time to capture, as well as eliminating human error. The engine monitors human interactions from your team, including mouse movements, hovers, and keystrokes, to learn over time, meaning that it requires less and less human intervention as it grows more familiar with your invoicing processes. The platform transforms unstructured data into a standardized format and processes invoices in line with pre-defined policies, helping to reduce the risks of fraud and non-compliance. Finally, Rossum offers support for ISO, SOC 2 Type 1, and HIPAA compliance, with granular role and user management controls and detailed audit logs.

Rossum can be connected to existing accounts payable, RPA, ERP email, and document management software using pre-built integrations and APIs for easier data transfer and more streamlined management. The platform’s cloud-native architecture makes it relatively straightforward to deploy and integrate. Overall, we recommend Rossum to any sized organization looking for a strong data extraction and document processing platform that integrates with their existing accounting software to automate invoice processing.

Sage Intacct

Sage is a financial software provider specializing in accounting, payroll, and HR solutions for SMBs and accountants. Sage Intacct is their holistic, cloud-based finance software solution designed to help small businesses monitor and manage their financial transactions—including their accounts payable.

With Sage Intacct’s “point-and-click” workflow controls, accounting teams can easily define custom workflows and approvals to make their processes run as efficiently as possible. This automation ensures that all accounts are paid to the right vendors, at the right time, while greatly reducing the need for manual data input. Sage Intacct also offers robust reporting functionality; teams can generate reports into liabilities, vendor-ageing, and bill and check registers in real-time for continuous visibility into the state of their business’ finances.

Delivered in the cloud, Sage Intacct offers scalability and flexibility to meet the needs of a growing business. Additionally, it integrates via API with external data processing and financial applications such as Salesforce, to help save time spent reconciling data and increase productivity. We recommend Sage Intacct for small businesses looking for user-friendly and simple accounts payable software that will give them greater visibility and help make their accounts payable workflows more efficient.

SAP Concur

SAP is a global leading provider of business process management software, including HR, finance, CRM, business technology, and supply chain solutions. SAP Concur is their suite of expense and invoice management tools, which includes SAP Concur Invoice. Concur Invoice digitizes and automates all end-to-end process and workflows, helping SMBs to increase visibility into their financials and make their cash flows more efficient. And with SAP Concur’s mobile app, accounting teams can do this from anywhere, at any time.

Concur Invoice automates workflows to reduce the need for manual data entry, helping to make AP transactions run more efficiently and with fewer errors. The solution also offers automatic two- and three-way invoice matching, which ensures that purchase orders, invoices and receipts are in line to prevent duplicate payments. Accounting teams can generate or schedule out-of-the-box and custom reports into their accounts payable data to help them monitor trends and better manage their spending. Finally, Concur Invoice also offers a web- and mobile-based app for processing supplier invoices, enabling accounting teams to access data whenever they need it, wherever they need it, from authorized accounts.

SAP Concur Invoice integrates seamlessly with existing ERP and accounting systems such as NetSuite for easy data reconciliation, as well as with a range of payment providers to streamline the vendor payment process. We recommend SAP Concur Invoice as a strong invoice processing and accounts payable solution for small- to mid-sized organizations looking for a way to automate their AP processes and access their accounts payable securely on the go.

Tipalti

Tipalti is a financial technology provider that offers accounts payable, procurement, and global payments automation capabilities via a unified, flagship platform. With its comprehensive suite of accounts payable capabilities, Tipalti enables finance teams to ensure accurate and timely payments across 196 countries, with support for 120 currencies and six different payment methods.

With Tipalti, finance teams can reduce their workload by enabling their suppliers to conduct data entry themselves via the platform’s self-service supplier portal. Once invoice data is captured, the platform automatically matches and processes it at the header and line level. Tipalti also offers fraud prevention in the form of detailed payee monitoring; the platform monitors certain payee datapoints, including contact details, payment information, and account numbers, to uncover unusual—and potentially fraudulent—activity. The platform further helps eliminate errors via its engine of over 26,000 built-in rules, including tax compliance, and PO matching. Finally, Tipalti utilizes artificial intelligence to streamline invoice and purchase order management and optimize workflows for more efficient accounts payable processing. It also offers AI-powered chat, with a digital assistant that offers financial insights and spend analytics on demand.

The Tipalti platform is built on a multi-entity cloud structure, making it relatively easy to deploy and allowing to scale easily. Deployment and ongoing management are further streamlined by the platform’s numerous pre-built and API-enabled integrations with ERP, accounting, performance marketing, HRIS, SSO, ticketing, credit card, and communication systems. Overall, we recommend Tipalti as a strong accounts payable solution for small- and mid-sized organizations looking for powerful automation, lots of built-in rules to mitigate errors and fraud, and global support.

Xero

Xero is a cloud-based accounting software solution designed to help small businesses, accountants and bookkeepers keep on top of their financial transactions. To do this, it offers a wide set of bookkeeping features, including bill payment, expense claiming, bank reconciliation, accounts receivable, inventory tracking, sales tax calculation, and project tracking. Xero is delivered via three plans: Starter, Standard and Premium, targeted at the self-employed, SMBs, and enterprises respectively.

From Xero’s central dashboard, accounting teams can easily see which payments are due or waiting approval, make immediate payments and schedule future payments to uphold supplier relationships and avoid defaulting. Xero also supports batch and multi-currency payments, with current exchange rates for over 160 currencies. Teams can generate real-time, custom reports into their spending and budget activity to monitor business performance against KPIs. All reports can be exported as a PDF, spreadsheet, or shared via email to keep key stakeholders in the loop. As well as desktop and web apps, Xero offers a suite of mobile applications for both the accounting team and other employees, making it easy for businesses to track their payments remotely, from any device.

Though Xero is a global solution, it’s most popular in the New Zealand, Australia, and UK markets. We recommend Xero’s Standard plan as a strong accounts payable solution for smaller businesses who want to gain better insights into their cash flow and manage their invoices more effectively. For mid-size and larger enterprises looking for the above, but who may work with vendors around the world in multiple currencies, we recommend Xero Premium.

Everything You Need To Know About Accounts Payable Solutions (FAQs)

What Are Accounts Payable Solutions?

Accounts payable is a short-term balance of money that your business owes its vendors, suppliers, and any other creditors for goods or services you’ve received from them. Just as you expect your customers to make payments in a timely manner, so do your suppliers. If you don’t pay your accounts payable debts on time, you could risk defaulting, which could impact your reputation amongst your customers and potential future stakeholders.

Managing your accounts payable is a critical component of monitoring your organization’s cash flow. If your accounts payable figure is increasing, it means you’re buying goods and services on credit, rather than cash you actually have. If it’s decreasing, you’re paying off your debts more quickly than you’re buying new services on credit. You can use this dynamic to create cash reserves at certain times, by paying off your accounts payable as close to the due date as possible. But recording and monitoring your accounts payable can be time-consuming and tricky—particularly if your business owes money to a lot of different creditors. That’s where accounts payable solutions come in.

Accounts payable software solutions, also known as accounts payable automation solutions, streamline the process of tracking and managing supplier invoices and employee expenses that you still need to pay. They do this by automating manual, administrative tasks such as data entry, invoice approval, and payment processing. Accounts payable solutions also provide you with a single, central platform from which to manage your invoices and handle documents. This enables your team to see exactly how much you owe all of your creditors, suppliers, and lenders in one place.

Accounts payable solutions can either be available as standalone products or implemented as part of a wider Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform. In both cases, these solutions take the strain off finance departments, enabling them to spend less time on repetitive admin and more time focussing on business growth.

How Do Accounts Payable Solutions Work?

Accounts payable solutions usually operate according to a similar model. First, they receive invoices from the suppliers, along with credit terms. They match each invoice with any supporting documents and verify them for accuracy, then automatically carry out invoice data entry. Then, the accounts payable solution requests approvals from authorized approvers.

Once approval is obtained, the solution makes a note of that in the system, and schedules, makes, and distributes invoice payments. Finally, it records the fact that the invoice was paid.

What Are The Benefits Of Implementing An Accounts Payable Solution

There are several reasons why your organization should consider implementing an accounts payable or accounts payable automation solution:

Streamline your accounts payable processes: By automating many of the manual tasks involved in managing your payable account, you can speed up the entire process from start to finish, removing the need for hours of data entry so your team can focus on business growth and cost-saving initiatives.
Reduce the risk of error: Not only does automation help speed things up; it also increases accuracy by eliminating the risk of human error such as creating duplicate payments by validating invoice data against ERP information and automating data entry.
Improve your cash flow: Accounts payable software provides you with real-time visibility into your funds, with detailed reports that make it easy for you to stay on top of your cash flow. This makes it easier for you to manage your spending, as well as ensure payments are made in a timely manner. This ensures that you can develop positive relationships with your suppliers.
Optimize your app9roval process: By automating many of the manual stages involved in invoice processing (such as routing approvals and notifying stakeholders), accounts payable solutions can help you avoid late fees, missing invoices, and unauthorized purchases. And by documenting each stage of the invoice journey, these solutions can also help you prevent fraud.
Build compliance into your workflows: The best accounts payable solutions enable you to build compliance rules into your automation workflows. This means that all actions are consistently logged and reported on, helping you quickly identify and remediate instances of non-compliance and fraud, such as duplicate invoices or suspicious additional charges.

What Features Should You Look For In An Accounts Payable Solution?

Accounts payable solutions may offer slightly different feature sets, depending on which industry and size of business they’re designed for and whether they’re standalone solutions or available as part of a wider ERP platform. That being said, there are some features that any strong accounts payable solution should offer. These include:

Automation: Your chosen accounts payable solution should be able to capture and extract relevant data from invoices automatically, reducing manual data entry. It should also automate approval workflows, thereby helping to save time and reduce the risk of errors.
Document management: Robust document management capabilities can help you to organize and store invoices, receipts, and other relevant documents securely. This will usually involve some type of cloud storage facility and should also include version control and audit trails to help you track changes made to invoices and payments.
Vendor management: All strong accounts payable solutions facilitate efficient communication with vendors. To do this, they may offer features such as automated notifications, a vendor portal, and the ability to track and manage vendor relationships.
Reporting and analytics: Your chosen solutions should offer advanced reporting and analytics tools that provide insights into spending patterns, payment trends, and other financial metrics. These reports should be fully customizable.
Multi-entity and multi-currency support: If you have suppliers or customers that are located in a different country to the one in which you operate, you need to make sure your chosen solution supports those currencies and can convert them for you.
OCR for invoices and expenses: To help reduce manual data entry, your chosen solution should user Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to automatically recognize and capture data from invoices.
Compliance and security: The solution should comply with any financial regulations and data protection standards that are relevant to your organization. The best solutions also offer in-built security features, such as data encryption and access controls, to help protect sensitive data.
Mobile accessibility: It’s important that your team can access your accounts payable solution via mobile devices, especially for approval processes that may require on-the-go accessibility.
Integrations: A strong accounts payable solution should integrate with your existing ERP system and other relevant software to avoid data silos and improve overall operational efficiency.
User-friendly interface: Choosing an account payable solution with a user-friendly interface will ensure quicker adoption by the team and can help reduce training time and errors.

Caitlin Harris

Deputy Head Of Content

Caitlin Harris is Deputy Head of Content at Expert Insights. Caitlin is an experienced writer and journalist, with years of experience producing award-winning technical training materials and journalistic content. Caitlin holds a First Class BA in English Literature and German, and provides our content team with strategic editorial guidance as well as carrying out detailed research to create articles that are accurate, engaging and relevant. Caitlin co-hosts the Expert Insights Podcast, where she interviews world-leading B2B tech experts.

Laura Iannini

Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.