Virtual Cards Challenge the ‘Cost of Doing Business’

Accounts payable (AP) has spent much of its history buried deep in the back office, with staff consigned to the tedium of typing invoices, auditing purchase orders, and cutting checks.

PYMNTS Intelligence data in the September 2025 Accounts Payable Tracker® Series found that more than two-thirds of businesses still key invoices by hand.

And for decades, the process of managing accounts payable has looked exceptionally similar across industries. A vendor submits an invoice, often by email or even postal mail. Someone in accounting prints, keys or uploads the invoice into an ERP or accounting tool. A series of approvals ensues, sometimes automated but often not. The invoice may contain errors or exceptions, requiring clarification or rework.

Eventually, it’s approved, scheduled and paid. And then it’s filed for recordkeeping. Rinse and repeat thousands of times, sometimes across dozens of disparate systems.

It’s no wonder so many organizations describe AP as repetitive, frustrating and fragile. The same PYMNTS report found that 88% of firms surveyed say their existing AP systems are fragmented and error-prone.

Organizations know this, yet the inertia of legacy workflows is stubborn. Why? For many, AP is still treated as a necessary evil instead of a source of business advantage.

But the future of AP doesn’t have to look that way. The convergence of automation, integration and incentive models is creating a new value chain for finance departments.

From Back Office to Strategic Lever

Digital transformation playbooks are crowded with initiatives promising cost savings, speed and visibility. AP automation has been around long enough that it hasn’t always excited the enterprise. But the difference now is the business landscape: Everything from capital markets to supply chains is under new performance pressure.

Manual invoice processing is costly in labor hours and lost productivity. Paper-based workflows rely on staff to perform low-value tasks instead of focusing on strategic initiatives. Errors lead to rework. Late approvals lead to late fees. Everything feeds a cycle of inefficiency.

For CFOs and controllers, the most compelling narrative is not how AP reduces headcount or cycle times. It’s how AP unlocks financial maneuverability. How it lets the company operate with greater liquidity, granularity and optionality. How it strengthens EBITDA. How it puts finance at the table for revenue conversations, not just cost controls.

After all, the short-term benefits of automating AP are well-understood: faster processing times, fewer errors, lower overhead. But the real game-changer lies in what an integrated AP system can do for the broader business. Modernizing AP creates opportunities upstream and downstream. It strengthens financial control, supports better vendor terms, optimizes working capital, and puts AP in the position to generate revenue.

Read the report: From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: AP Transformation in 2025

Embedded B2B payments platforms and managed-service models are central to this shift. The PYMNTS analysis highlights that fully-managed payment services allow organizations to process invoices up to four times faster, reduce late-payment penalties, and gain real-time visibility into cash flow.

Consider virtual cards. Firms can now issue digital payment instruments embedded with rebate programs that accrue cash back on every eligible transaction. Where there was once a cost of doing business, now there’s a credit line and in some cases, a six or seven-figure revenue stream. That’s especially true for enterprises with significant recurring supplier spend.

Beyond rebates, AP modernization pays off because it gives finance teams the data and pace they need. With complete digital capture, AI-driven coding and automation of approvals, AP becomes an engine for insight rather than a backlog of output.

At the same time, as CFOs increasingly participate in business-strategy discussions, they demand workflows that feed insight, not just data. A modern AP function can provide that feed.