Why Hiring More AP Staff Doesn't Fix Your Document Problem

It's tempting to hire your way out of a bottleneck. If someone else handled all this repetitive work, you'd finally have time for everything else on your plate. Plus, humans are all a bit predisposed to empire building, and it's nice to have people working for you.

AP teams deal with this all the time as companies scale and invoice volumes go up. Processing slows down, errors increase, month-end close drags on, and vendors start following up more frequently (and less politely). Most teams' natural instinct is to hire an AP clerk to handle the increased load, which works for a bit. But as invoice volumes continue to grow, the same errors, delays, and exceptions pop up again. Hiring kicks the can down the road, but ultimately you can't solve a process problem with more people.

Lido automates the document extraction work that AP teams spend most of their time on—pulling data from invoices, matching line items to purchase orders, and correcting OCR errors—so companies can scale invoice volume without scaling headcount. Soldier Field went from 20 hours of manual data entry per week to near zero after switching to Lido’s AI extraction.

Why more invoices means more AP processing errors, not just more work

AP work doesn't just grow linearly with invoice volume. It gets more complex and messy because you have more vendors with different formats and more exceptions to reconcile. Vendor names never exactly match your ERP records, line item reconciliation gets messier with more products, and there's always a hidden surcharge you need to cross-verify. Critically, each new vendor brings new quirks, not just a higher volume of existing edge cases to remember and handle. And standardization typically decreases as spend increases; your largest vendors are the least likely to follow your preferred format.

A 1% exception rate with 1,000 invoices/month = 10 per month. It's annoying for one person to manually reconcile but pretty manageable (even at 30 minutes per invoice that's only 5 hours per month). But if you keep that same 1% rate at 10,000 invoices/month, suddenly you're dealing with 50 hours of manual processing time, over 1 full working week of 1 person's time. And that 50 hours isn't evenly distributed either.  It's clustered around month-end, right when that person has a million other things to do.

Hiring more people to do manual data entry makes accuracy problems worse, not better. Every additional person introduces another source of human error. Context that used to live in one person's head is now spread out across multiple people, and the rules are always extremely weirdly bespoke to your company:

1. Vendor X always bills freight separately
2. Vendor Y has a parent co and an op co, and they'll send invoices from both interchangeably
3. Vendor Z's line item for "mittens" is labeled as "gloves" in our ERP

It's like flooding the pipes to find a leak; more volume will help you identify the broken parts of your process faster, but at some point you still need to fix the pipes.

What AP teams actually spend their time on instead of processing invoices

AP teams are a major gatekeeper to your company’s most valuable resource (cash) and well-run teams can turn your cash conversion cycle into real operating leverage. When invoices are accurate, visible, and predictable, finance can make better decisions, procurement can negotiate from a position of strength, and the business gains flexibility instead of constantly reacting to surprises.

Unfortunately, most teams are too bogged down in mundane daily tasks. Talk to almost any AP team processing hundreds or thousands of invoices a month, and you'll hear the same breakdown:

1. Downloading and sorting: Pulling invoices from email, portals, shared drives, sometimes fax machines
2. Manual data entry: Keying header info and line items into the ERP or a spreadsheet
3. Matching: Comparing invoice data against POs, receipts, and contracts
4. Exception handling: Chasing down discrepancies, missing POs, incorrect amounts
5. Filing and reconciliation: End-of-month cleanup, audit prep

Most of that work — downloading, data entry, and matching— follows clear rules. It's deterministic and requires consistency, not judgment. And yet it consumes the bulk of AP’s time, leaving less room for the higher-value work that actually improves cash flow, controls risk, and scales with the business.

What fixing the AP document processing problem actually looks like

Despite what you might read in the news, AI isn’t a magic cure-all for turning AP from a cost center into a value driver. The best-performing teams aren’t trying to automate everything. They’re deliberate about fully automating work that doesn’t require human judgment, and using AI to quickly surface the smaller set of invoices that do.

In practice, that means drawing clear lines between deterministic work, judgment-assisted work, and decisions that should always stay with humans.

AP processes you can fully and confidently automate

These tasks follow clear, repeatable rules and benefit most from consistency:

1. Downloading and sorting documents: Automatically ingesting invoices from email, vendor portals, shared drives, and other sources, and routing them to the correct workflow.
2. Manual data entry: Extracting invoice header fields and line-item data and structuring it reliably for downstream systems.
3. Basic validation checks: Verifying required fields, totals, invoice numbers, dates, and formatting before an invoice ever reaches a human.
4. Deduplication: Detecting exact and near-duplicate invoices across channels to prevent double payment.

This is the “grunt work” that slows teams down and creates errors. It’s also the safest part of the workflow to automate, since it doesn't ask AI to make judgment calls.

AP processes you can partially automate and speed up with AI

These tasks benefit from automation, but still require human oversight:

1. Matching and reconciliation: Matching invoices against POs, receipts, and contracts, and flagging only the mismatches that fall outside predefined tolerances.
2. Exception triage: Categorizing discrepancies (price, quantity, missing PO, tax issues) so reviewers start with context instead of a blank screen.
3. Anomaly detection: Highlighting invoices that look unusual based on historical patterns — unexpected amounts, timing anomalies, or new vendors — without blocking the entire workflow.
4. Vendor communication drafts: Pre-populating outreach messages with the relevant details when clarification or correction is needed.

Here, AI's role isn't to decide, but rather to narrow the problem space for humans to accelerate review.

Where humans should stay firmly in the loop

These decisions benefit from experience, context, and accountability:

1. Interpreting contracts and edge-case terms
2. Making judgment calls on disputed charges
3. Approving exceptions that impact cash, compliance, or vendor relationships

This is the work AP teams are hired for — and the work they rarely get enough time to do today.

The end state to aim for

When the core AP process fixed, most invoices flow through automatically, a small percentage are surfaced for review with clear context, and AP spends its time making decisions instead of moving data around.

What this unlocks for AP teams

Freeing AP from manual processing allows teams to focus on higher-leverage work that actually improves business operations, including:

1. Exception trend analysis: Identifying recurring issues by vendor, category, or PO type — and eliminating them at the source.
2. Vendor relationship management: Working proactively with high-volume or high-friction vendors to standardize billing practices, clarify expectations, and reduce back-and-forth before invoices ever reach AP.
3. Cash flow visibility and forecasting support: Providing finance with accurate, timely insight into upcoming liabilities instead of cleaning up data after the fact.
4. Contract and pricing compliance: Ensuring invoices reflect negotiated terms, catching overbilling and expired discounts.
5. Proactive workflow improvement: Refining policies, tolerances, and controls as the business scales instead of reacting to breakdowns.

How Lido automates AP document processing to reduce headcount pressure

Lido extracts data from invoices, POs, receipts, and other documents — regardless of format — without templates or model training. Upload a document, tell it what to extract, and get structured data back in minutes. Then, automate downstream matching and upload to your ERP.

1. No setup. Start processing documents in under 5 minutes
2. Works with any format. Handles different vendor formats automatically, so things don't break when document layouts change
3. Intelligent matching and automation. AI powered matching with your ERP confidently matches account numbers, line items, and more with confidence intervals and exception flagging

Companies like Tok Commercial, ACS Industries, and Soldier Field use Lido to process thousands of documents each week, freeing their teams up to grow the core business.