Picture the kickoff for a major ERP transformation. The steering committee is in the room. General ledger, supply chain, data migration, and reporting all have owners and timelines. Then someone asks about accounts payable, and the answer is some version of “we’ll sort that out after go-live.”
As a Basware Partner of the Year, Extropy Advisors hears it on almost every ERP transformation we’re brought into. Accounts payable touches every supplier, every invoice, and a big share of the company’s cash going out the door. Yet it’s routinely the last workstream planned and the first one squeezed when budgets get tight.
Back in May, Ravit Gutman, Founder and CEO of Extropy Advisors, sat down with Jason Kurtz, CEO of Basware, on Extropy On AIr to talk about exactly this. Their focus was SAP Cloud ERP and S/4HANA migrations, but the pattern shows up no matter which ERP you’re moving to. As Jason put it:
“What companies are doing is just kind of saying, ‘Hey, we’ll deal with that later.’ And it’s just moving the pain and the cost and the benefit way down in the cycle.”
Why does this matter more now?
Six months later, the stakes are higher. SAP’s mainstream maintenance for ECC ends on December 31, 2027, which is now about 14 months away. Programs racing toward S/4HANA and SAP Cloud ERP are locking in their architecture right now, and that’s exactly when AP gets left behind.
The compliance clock is moving too. France’s e-invoicing mandate went live on September 1, 2026, and smaller French businesses join the issuing requirement in September 2027. It’s a preview of what finance teams in more countries will face, and we mapped what’s coming in our country-by-country guide to the 2027 e-invoicing wave.
And with 2027 budgets being finalized this quarter, the decision about whether AP gets real funding and real attention is being made in rooms like the one above. So we wanted to revisit the conversation and share what we’re still seeing on client programs.
Why does accounts payable get pushed to the back of the line?
It’s rarely a deliberate decision. AP slides down the list for a few very human reasons.
It looks like a solved problem. Invoices get paid today, so leadership assumes the new ERP will simply keep doing that. Nobody sees the spreadsheets, workarounds, and tribal knowledge holding the current process together.
The program is already enormous. When a team is staring down chart of accounts redesign, data cleansing, and integrations, anything that seems to be working gets labeled phase two.
The people closest to the work aren’t in the room. AP managers and processors know exactly where exceptions pile up. They’re usually brought in at testing, when the design decisions are already made.
AP doesn’t fit neatly inside the ERP. Supplier onboarding, invoice capture, matching rules, approval routing, e-invoicing mandates, and payments all carry real complexity. Most ERPs were never built to handle all of it natively, so it gets parked until someone is forced to deal with it.
What does it cost when AP is an afterthought?
When AP is an afterthought, the bill shows up in three places.
The “clean core” stops being clean. Modern ERP strategies, SAP’s especially, depend on keeping the core system standard. When AP isn’t planned up front, teams end up rebuilding AP logic inside the ERP as custom code. Every custom object is something that has to be retested at every future upgrade, which is exactly the cost a cloud move was supposed to eliminate. Jason shared one striking example: a large SAP customer found that handling AP inside SAP would have required more than 3,000 customizations in AP alone, compared with essentially none with Basware alongside it.
Compliance risk creeps in. E-invoicing mandates keep spreading across countries, with real deadlines and real penalties. As Jason said, these mandates “don’t wait for ERP migrations.” He cited a Basware study finding that 56% of companies have missed e-invoicing deadlines in ways that held back their market expansion. That’s not an IT problem. It’s a growth problem.
People carry the gap. Your AP team ends up learning a new system while still running manual workarounds to keep suppliers paid. Late payments strain supplier relationships, and burnout follows. Months or years of value the transformation promised simply never arrive.
Where should AP complexity live?
Most programs ask, “How does AP fit into the new ERP?” That question assumes the ERP should absorb all of it.
A more useful question is: where should AP complexity live, and who owns it? For many organizations, the answer is to keep the ERP standard and let a purpose-built AP platform handle capture, matching, approvals, supplier networks, and compliance. Then integrate the two cleanly. For others, more can stay inside the ERP. Either answer can be right. What’s wrong is not deciding at all. Or as Jason put it simply, “That complexity has to live somewhere.”
The point is to make that call on purpose, early, and with the people who run AP every day.
Five things to do before your ERP architecture is locked in
Jason’s advice for anyone in the middle of a program was to take a step back and ask an honest question: is the workflow we’re building today better handled somewhere else? And to ask it now, not at the end. Here’s where we’d start.
- Give AP a seat at the design table. Bring your AP lead into blueprinting, not just user acceptance testing.
- Map the real process, not the documented one. Capture the exceptions, manual touches, and workarounds your team relies on today. That’s where the hidden complexity lives.
- Put the ownership question to your systems integrator. Ask directly where AP complexity will live and who maintains it after go-live. Get the answer in writing before design is signed off.
- Plan for compliance you can see coming. List the e-invoicing and tax mandates in every country you operate in, with dates, and design for them now.
- Protect AP during the transition. Decide how invoices keep flowing and suppliers keep getting paid while the migration runs, so your team isn’t improvising mid-cutover.
Accounts payable deserves a seat in your ERP transformation
An ERP transformation is a once-in-a-decade chance to get finance operations right. AP is where that promise meets every supplier you work with. Treating it as an afterthought doesn’t make the complexity go away. It just moves it somewhere more expensive. To see what a focused AP investment can deliver, read how Dexcom transformed AP efficiency with Basware.
Ravit summed it up at the end of the episode:
“SAP migration is a rare moment where the conditions for real change actually exist. AP is not a back office detail in that moment. It’s a foundational architecture call.”
Want to hear the full conversation? Listen to Why AP Is the Hidden Risk in Your SAP Migration on Extropy On AIr.
Frequently asked questions
Why is accounts payable overlooked in ERP transformation?
AP looks like a solved problem because invoices are getting paid today, and ERP programs prioritize general ledger, supply chain, and data migration first. The people who run AP are rarely in design sessions, so its complexity stays hidden until testing or after go-live.
When should AP be included in an SAP S/4HANA or SAP Cloud ERP migration?
At the start, during planning and blueprinting. Deciding early where AP complexity will live protects the clean core, brings ROI forward, and avoids rebuilding AP logic as custom code later.
How does accounts payable affect a clean core strategy?
AP carries complex workflows, approval hierarchies, supplier rules, and country mandates. Building that inside the ERP creates customizations that must be retested at every upgrade. A specialist AP platform integrated through SAP BTP keeps that complexity outside the core.
How do e-invoicing mandates affect ERP projects?
Mandates follow government deadlines, not project timelines. France’s mandate went live on September 1, 2026, and more countries are following. The AP architecture you choose during migration determines whether you can stay compliant without emergency customizations.
Book a Discovery Call to talk through where AP fits in your ERP transformation, before your architecture is locked in.
