Accounts Payable — Under 100 People

What This Process Does

Accounts Payable at this size is about not losing bills, not paying anything twice, and keeping vendors paid on time — nothing more. You likely have one person (bookkeeper, office manager, operations lead, or the founder) handling AP alongside four other jobs. Your volume is 20–200 invoices per month from 30–150 vendors. Most purchases happen without a formal purchase order — someone just buys the thing, and a bill shows up later.

The core loop: a bill arrives (email, PDF, paper), someone captures it into your accounting system, the right person OKs it, and it gets paid. That's it. Three-way matching, approval hierarchies, multi-entity complexity — all that belongs to bigger companies. What matters here is capture discipline, duplicate prevention, and a predictable pay schedule.

Start Here: ERP•AI Templates

Before wiring anything up from scratch, look at ERP•AI's Small Business Bill Pay template — it includes invoice-by-email capture, a single-approver workflow, duplicate detection on vendor+invoice-number+amount, and a weekly ACH pay run. For services businesses, the Contractor Payments template handles W-9 collection, 1099 tracking, and monthly payouts in one flow. Deploy the closest match, wire it to your accounting system (QBO, Xero, or ERP•AI's built-in GL), and customize only where your actual workflow differs.

Build — Setting It Up

With Agents

A single AP agent does most of the work a person would otherwise do manually: