Why the best time to set up AP controls is before you think you need them
Nobody sets out to build a broken AP process. At five people, approvals happen naturally because the founder sees every invoice, signs off in real time, and the books stay clean. At twenty people, things get busier but still manageable. Somewhere around fifty, the cracks appear: finance is chasing approvals across email and Slack, suppliers are chasing payments, and when someone asks “who approved that?” the answer depends on who you ask.
The process didn’t fail overnight. It was simply outgrown, and by the time most businesses recognize the problem, they’re already deep in it.
In a recent ApprovalMax webinar, Aaron Patrick sat down with Lara Manton (bookkeeper processing 700 invoices a month for her largest client) and James Goulsbra to talk about what good AP controls actually look like, where they typically fail, and why the best time to build them is before you think you need them.
• Implement AP controls before things start breaking. Building good habits with 20 invoices a week is far easier than retrofitting them at 200.
• If invoices land in individual inboxes with no central ownership, payments will get missed. Centralizing intake is the first thing to fix.
• Due diligence arrives without warning. When a buyer or investor asks “who authorized this spend?” you need an answer within seconds.
• Bottlenecks, fragmentation, and unclear ownership are process problems. An approval stuck in one person’s inbox disappears when that person goes on holiday.
• One conversation about AP controls often leads to three more. Fixing the approval process tends to reveal gaps in cash flow management, reporting, and fraud prevention that were hiding underneath.
Fixing AP controls after the fact is painful and expensive
Every business needs a reset moment to look at what’s working, what isn’t, and whether the right controls are in place. The start of a financial year is a natural trigger, but most businesses skip it because things feel manageable enough.
The conversations that follow tend to look the same: a business has lost grip on its spend and payment runs, nobody is quite sure what’s been committed or paid, and untangling things retrospectively costs enormous time. A receipt capture tool and a basic approval structure on day one would have saved months of cleanup.
The practical advice is straightforward: get the systems in place before you think you need them. Implementing when things are already falling apart means more time on setup, more time on training, and a much higher chance of hitting problems. Get it in early, get people used to it, and tweak as you go.
Lara processes around 700 invoices a month for her largest client (£500 million turnover) and has put over 40,000 transactions through OCR in a single year. Her target: invoice to full approval in four to five days, with payment following within the week.
What a well-run AP process actually looks like
A well-structured AP process applies at almost any scale. The principles are the same whether you’re processing 20 invoices a month or 700.
It starts with intake. If invoices are landing in individual inboxes with no central ownership, that’s the first point of failure. Payments get missed and nobody owns the process. Step one is always centralizing how invoices come in and making sure everything is captured accurately from the start.
From there, OCR and AI capture handle the data extraction so the finance team can focus on reviewing rather than manually keying. The system should learn over time: if the same supplier has been coded to the same account fifteen times, it should know that by now.
Then comes the approval chain. Some businesses need two levels of approval, others need six. The principle stays the same: every approver needs enough context to make a genuine decision. That means seeing the supplier, the amount, the line items, and any supporting documents. If an approver has a question, that conversation needs to happen inside the system. Once it moves to Slack or email, the thread is lost and the audit trail breaks.
Due diligence arrives without warning
Due diligence is one of those things that shows up with no advance notice. A business is being acquired, or acquiring someone else, and suddenly the first questions are about financial controls: how spend is managed, who authorized what, and when those authorizations happened.
Consider a scenario that comes up more often than you’d expect: four or five people in a business have direct bank access and are all making payments whenever they see fit. Managing cash flow in that environment is almost impossible because there’s no reliable picture of what’s been committed. In a due diligence situation, that setup collapses. Someone asks who’s responsible for a particular payment, and everyone points at each other.
An audit trail changes that entirely. Every invoice has a clear record of who raised it and who approved it, with timestamps at every step. When an auditor or a buyer asks for proof, the answer takes seconds to produce.
The three places AP processes break first
Bottlenecks. Something gets stuck with one person, nobody else knows about it, and then that person goes on holiday. The approval is forgotten entirely. This is the most common failure point in growing AP processes, and it’s preventable with delegation and escalation rules built into the workflow.
Fragmentation. The invoice is in the approval system, the question about it is on Slack, and the follow-up went by email. Three threads later, nobody can find the original document. The fix is simple: keep the document, the context, and the decision trail in one place so that when anyone asks for something, the answer takes seconds to find.
Unclear ownership. People in larger teams hesitate to approve because they’re unsure what they’re allowed to do. Defining clear approval limits and communicating them removes that uncertainty, because once everyone understands that finance handles the coding while the approver confirms the spend is legitimate, approvals speed up immediately.
Invoice fraud and scamming have reached a point where even experienced bookkeepers are getting caught by invoices that look completely genuine. An approval chain with two or three sets of eyes on each invoice makes those scams far less likely to slip through. For outsourced finance teams especially, having someone internal confirm “yes, this is legitimate” is essential.
Meet people where they already work
One of the most practical insights from the session involved a client who had 150 unread emails and zero unread Slacks, so the team connected approval notifications to Slack and suddenly she was approving invoices on her commute.
The lesson applies broadly. If the approval process feels like extra admin layered on top of someone’s actual job, people will route around it, and once people start skipping steps it becomes very hard to tell whether that was forgetfulness or something more deliberate.
The goal is making approvals feel like a natural part of the workflow. Tools like ApprovalMax help here because approvers don’t need to learn an accounting system. The approve button does exactly what it says, and it removes the jargon and friction that comes with giving people full QuickBooks or Xero access.
One AP conversation leads to three more
Any accountant or bookkeeper who’s worked with growing clients will recognize this: one conversation about approvals tends to open up three or four other areas where you can help. Approvals lead to cash flow, which leads to reporting, which leads to controls. The client ends up trusting you with far more than they originally brought you in for.
Clients often know something is wrong with their process, even if they can’t pinpoint the cause or describe what better looks like. One large company with a highly qualified finance team was doing things a certain way simply because that’s what they knew, and nobody had shown them what else was possible. Once they saw it, they were completely on board.
The most effective way to start these conversations is with proof points. A short video, a case study, a simple “here’s what we did for this client and here’s the difference it made.” That tends to be more powerful than any advisory conversation, because it shows what’s possible in concrete terms.
One AP conversation leads to three more
Any accountant or bookkeeper who’s worked with growing clients will recognize this: one conversation about approvals tends to open up three or four other areas where you can help. Approvals lead to cash flow, which leads to reporting, which leads to controls. The client ends up trusting you with far more than they originally brought you in for.
Clients often know something is wrong with their process, even if they can’t pinpoint the cause or describe what better looks like. One large company with a highly qualified finance team was doing things a certain way simply because that’s what they knew, and nobody had shown them what else was possible. Once they saw it, they were completely on board.
The most effective way to start these conversations is with proof points. A short video, a case study, a simple “here’s what we did for this client and here’s the difference it made.” That tends to be more powerful than any advisory conversation, because it shows what’s possible in concrete terms.
Where to start
If you’re recognizing any of these patterns in your own business or your clients’ businesses, here’s where to start:
- Centralize your invoice intake. Every invoice should arrive in one place with clear ownership. Individual inboxes are where payments go to die.
- Define who approves what, at every threshold. If that answer changes depending on who you ask, the process needs tightening.
- Build the structure before the volume arrives. Good habits with 20 invoices a week are far easier to maintain than good habits introduced at 200.
- Keep everything in one system. The invoice, the approval, the conversation, and the audit trail should all live together. The moment context scatters across Slack, email, and a shared drive, you lose the thread.
- Have the conversation proactively. If you can see a risk, raise it. Clients often know something is broken. They’re waiting for someone to help them name the problem and show them what better looks like.
This article is based on a ApprovalMax webinar featuring Aaron Patrick, Lara Manton, and James Goulsbra. Watch the full recording here.
