Finance leaders are under growing pressure to improve forecasting accuracy, protect margins, and optimize working capital. Yet many organizations continue to manage spend only after an invoice arrives, missing opportunities to prevent leakage much earlier in the purchasing process.
The opportunity to influence issues like price or budget impact starts much earlier in the transaction. By the time an invoice reaches AP, leakage may already be built into it.
According to research from The Hackett Group, organizations lose as much as 16 percent of negotiated savings to maverick buying. To put that in context, if a company is expecting $10 million in negotiated savings, $500,000 to $1.6 million of those savings may already have slipped away.
Basic invoice automation makes processing faster and more efficient, but speed alone doesn’t protect margins. If the underlying spend was never properly controlled, you’re simply making faster, more efficient mistakes.
To prevent leakage before it happens, your team needs clear insight into whether a purchase was authorized or whether negotiated pricing was followed.
That means connecting the dots between each step in the process, from purchasing to payment.
Putting first things first
The earlier your finance team can see and influence a purchase, the greater its ability to protect your margins. That may start with a formal purchase request, or it could begin with a purchase order.
Either way, the goal remains the same. You need to capture what the organization intends to buy, who they’re buying it from, the price, as well as noting the necessary approvals.
A PO gives your team concrete control. It lists everything that was authorized, the terms of the agreement, and what you expect to receive. When that information stays connected to the rest of the process, your team is provided with a comprehensive view.
Purchase request → Approval → Purchase order → Receipt → Invoice → Payment
Individual steps may vary from company to company, but what matters is that the information and controls remain visible as the transaction moves forward.
With a clearer chain of accountability, your finance team can see what has been committed to before money goes out the door. That’s a stronger position than simply noting what’s already happened after it’s done.
Connect the entire purchase-to-pay process
Commitments don’t always appear in AP immediately. A purchase made late in the month may not be invoiced until the following month. If your team can only see what has been billed, they don’t have visibility into that commitment even though you’ve already agreed to the purchase.
That visibility gap also makes forecasting harder.
85% of CFOs surveyed by FTI Consulting identified forecasting accuracy as an area needing improvement.
Without a comprehensive view across the entire purchasing journey, you may be forecasting from incomplete information. It’s a major reason that PwC’s 2025 Global Treasury Survey found that 76% of finance leaders cited poor data quality as a forecasting challenge.
This holistic take on the purchasing journey provides a clearer view of what you’ve already committed to spend, not just what your suppliers have invoiced. Your team has visibility into what has been approved, what has been received, and what needs to be paid, giving time to question unexpected commitments, surface potential budget overruns and adjust cash plans before payment is due.
Each link in the chain adds to your financial control, creating a connected purchase-to-pay process.
How Each Stage Protects Margin:
- Purchase Request & Approval: Enforces purchasing policies and budget authorization at the point of intent, preventing unapproved or off-contract spend before any commitment is made.
- Purchase Order (PO): Establishes the official baseline for cost, vendor, and terms. It converts intent into visibility, giving finance a current record of committed spend before an invoice ever hits the inbox.
- Receipt: Confirms that goods or services were actually delivered according to the agreed terms, preventing payment for incomplete or missing deliverables.
- Invoice & Matching: Automated two- or three-way matching validates line items against the PO and receipt, catching price variances, incorrect unit costs, or duplicate charges.
- Payment: Releases cash only after full upstream validation, helping teams capture early-payment discounts and optimize payment timing for cash flow.
And when the invoice does arrive, your team already has the data to validate it against what was authorized and received, rather than being forced to play detective and piece things together retrospectively.
Connecting each step in the process gives finance a more complete view of the process.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
When you apply controls too late, AP becomes the landing spot for upstream mistakes, from missing POs to incorrect prices to purchases made outside policy.
Rather than leaving your team to fix what’s already broken, why not start asking:
How can we prevent exceptions from happening in the first place?
When your entire purchase-to-pay process is connected, problems can be identified earlier. Better PO and purchasing practices help you avoid exceptions, rather than being forced to correct them after the fact. And when exceptions do occur, your team has the capacity and data to quickly resolve the issue.
The future of AP is proactive
The organizations achieving the greatest value from AP aren't just processing invoices faster. They're creating visibility across the entire purchasing journey, allowing finance to influence spending decisions before costs are incurred. In an environment where forecasting accuracy, working capital optimization, and margin protection are under constant scrutiny, that visibility has become a strategic advantage.
Discover how to improve control across your AP processes: https://www.quadient.com/en-us/apautomation