The maintenance renewal agreement lands in your inbox. Your organization has used its invoice capture software for years. Your accounts payable (AP) team knows the system, invoices are getting processed, and the expense is already in the budget.
Approving another year may seem straightforward. But before you sign, ask your AP team one question: How much work does it take to turn a captured invoice into usable data?
For finance leaders whose organizations use legacy data capture solutions, that question is a practical starting point for reviewing the value of your current setup. A renewal is an opportunity to examine the results you receive and the effort it takes to achieve them.
In this blog post, we’ll walk through how to measure the work that happens after invoice capture, calculate what it really costs, and test an alternative before you commit to another year.
Look at What Happens After Invoice Capture
An invoice enters the system. Data appears on the screen. The capture step is complete.
Then, an AP specialist corrects the supplier information, checks an invoice number, rekeys missing line items, or emails someone about an exception. Another employee knows that invoices from a particular supplier always need a second look.
These interventions can become so familiar that they disappear into the daily routine. Employees learn the workarounds. Supervisors plan around them. Finance sees invoices moving through the process but doesn’t always see everything required to keep them moving.
Consider an illustrative example: a supplier invoice contains 20 line items. The system captures the invoice number, date, and total, but an employee must correct quantities and enter missing item details before the invoice can move forward.
The invoice was captured, but it still requires substantial manual work.
When that pattern repeats across hundreds or thousands of invoices, it’s worth asking whether your current solution still delivers the operational value you expect. If you’re unsure, these signs it’s time to replace your AP automation solution can help.
Calculate More Than the Maintenance Fee
The renewal amount is easy to see. The cost of repeated intervention is harder to spot because it’s often spread across AP salaries, overtime, IT support, and outside assistance.
Start by examining the time employees spend correcting fields, re-entering information, investigating capture-related exceptions, and maintaining configurations for changing invoice formats. Include the effort required to identify and repair errors that reach downstream systems.
Small amounts of work add up quickly. For example, if 3,000 invoices each require an average of three minutes of correction, that represents 150 hours of staff time. This illustrative calculation gives finance a way to translate recurring intervention into a workload it can evaluate.
There’s also a capacity question. What could the team accomplish with fewer repetitive corrections? Could it respond to suppliers faster, absorb higher invoice volumes, or investigate unusual transactions more thoroughly? That last point carries extra weight today. According to the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), 79% of organizations were victims of attempted or actual payments fraud activity in 2024.
Stronger fraud prevention, faster supplier responses, and greater scalability all belong in the renewal discussion alongside the software expense.
Measure the Work Your AP Team Actually Performs
A useful assessment begins with a manageable sample of invoices and a clear definition of when their data becomes usable.
Ask your AP team to record four measures:
- Manual touches: Count the manual interventions needed after capture. Note whether employees correct fields, rekey line items, look up missing information, or route problems manually. Distinguish routine approval and necessary financial judgment from work caused by incomplete or inaccurate data.
- Correction time: Measure how long employees spend repairing captured information. Separate active handling time from time spent waiting in a queue. Both affect the process, but they point to different problems.
- Exception frequency: Track how often invoices require intervention and why. Group recurring issues by supplier, document type, field, or line-item requirement. Separate capture problems from genuine business exceptions, such as a pricing discrepancy or missing receipt.
- Time to usable data: Measure elapsed time from invoice receipt until the required information is complete, validated, and ready for the next processing step. Capture speed alone may overlook work that happens afterward.
Review results across invoice types. An overall average can conceal a category that consumes a disproportionate amount of AP effort.
The goal is to establish a baseline that finance and AP can use together. Industry benchmarks, such as APQC’s accounts payable benchmarks for cost per invoice and invoice cycle time, can add helpful context as you interpret your results.
Put an Alternative Through a Representative Test
Once you understand your current performance, you have a clearer basis for evaluating another approach.
A demonstration can introduce a solution’s capabilities. A proof of concept can help show how those capabilities apply to your organization’s workload.
Choose a representative invoice sample that includes common suppliers, varied formats, complex line items, and documents that regularly create rework. Include routine invoices as well as difficult ones so the evaluation reflects the mix your team receives.
Agree on success measures before testing. Define which header fields and line-item details must be captured, what validation is required, and how corrections and exceptions will be recorded.
Compare both approaches using the same invoices and requirements. Record initial results before manual correction, along with the effort required to make the data usable. Document any setup or configuration work, too.
This creates a more useful comparison than a polished demonstration alone. It gives finance evidence about accuracy, completeness, processing effort, and potential capacity improvements.
Make Your Next Renewal an Informed Decision
A renewal deserves a current view of performance. Your AP team’s familiarity with the system is valuable, and so is understanding the work it still requires.
AI is already part of that conversation for many finance teams. Gartner’s 2025 AI in Finance Survey found that accounts payable process automation is one of the most common AI use cases in finance functions.
MetaSource’s AI-powered AP automation software, SourceAP™, brings header and line-item capture, validation, workflow, and expert-assisted exception resolution into one process. Before your next maintenance renewal, schedule a demo and discuss whether a proof of concept would help you compare results against your current process.
Bring the invoices that cause the most rework. Agree on what matters to your team. Then, use the findings to decide where your next investment should go.
Ready to see how your current process compares? Schedule an accounts payable automation demo to see SourceAP in action and discuss whether a proof of concept makes sense before your next maintenance renewal. If you’re not quite sure where your current process stands, take our free Invoice Processing Maturity Self-Assessment.
