Accounts payable · Productivity
Manual entry of a dozen multi-line bills is slow enough to be worth measuring. Here is how to work out what your own bill run costs before you change anything.
Published · Updated
Managing accounts payable by hand is time-consuming and error-prone, which everybody agrees with and almost nobody measures. Before deciding whether to change it, it is worth knowing what the current process actually costs you.
Step 1. Time the next batch
Note the start and finish of your next bill run, and how many invoices were in it.
Step 2. Count the lines, not the invoices
Entry effort scales with line count. A run of ten single-line bills and a run of ten twenty-line bills are not the same job.
Step 3. Count the corrections
How many bills had to be revisited afterwards — wrong account, wrong amount, entered twice? That rework is part of the cost.
Step 4. Multiply by your run frequency
Weekly bill runs make a small per-run number into a meaningful annual one.
Run the same batch through Cosmic Bills and time the review instead of the entry. The comparison you want is not typing versus nothing — it is typing versus checking. Checking is faster, but it is not zero, and any comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth much.
Be careful with the first run
Of everything a finance team does, accounts payable is high-volume, rule-driven and slow to optimise. That is why it goes first.
Scan history, PDF preview, supplier mapping and line splitting — the parts people actually use every week.
A direct Xero connection, time back on every bill run, and a lower cost per invoice as your volume grows.
Start on the free plan, connect Xero or Reckon, and process your first bills today.