If chasing down invoices feels like a part-time job you never applied for, you are not imagining it. Most small and mid-sized businesses are still running accounts payable the way they did a decade ago: PDFs in an inbox, spreadsheets that someone has to remember to update, and a payment process that depends on whoever is free that afternoon. 

The cost of that approach is higher than most finance teams realise. Manual invoice processing runs $14 to $16 per invoice on average, while automated systems bring that down to as little as $3, a savings of up to 80% for businesses with real volume. Multiply that across hundreds of invoices a month, and the math gets hard to ignore. 

Here are the 11 invoice payment automation challenges we see most often, and how to actually solve each one. 

11 invoice payment automation challenges (and how to fix them) 

1. Manual data entry that eats your week 

Someone on your team is still opening PDFs, retyping line items, and hoping they did not transpose a number. It is slow, it is boring, and it is exactly the kind of work humans are bad at doing accurately for hours on end. AI-powered bill capture solves this by reading invoices automatically and pulling the data straight into your workflow, no retyping required. Forwardly’s bill capture handles this in the background. Every detail and line item is captured and coded with near 100% accuracy. With this automation, your team can spend their time on decisions instead of data entry. 

2. Approval bottlenecks that turn into late payments 

An invoice sits in someone’s inbox for a week because they are travelling, in meetings, or just buried. By the time it gets approved, you have missed the payment window and annoyed a vendor who was counting on you. Automated approval routing moves invoices to the right person instantly, with mobile approvals, so a bottleneck does not depend on someone being at their desk. 

3. No real visibility into what is overdue 

If you have ever been surprised by how much is sitting in unpaid invoices, you are far from alone. 56% of US small businesses currently have outstanding unpaid invoices, owed an average of $17,500 each, and 47% report invoices overdue by more than 30 days. A live dashboard that shows what is owed, what is overdue, and what is coming due replaces the work of reconstructing the picture from three different spreadsheets every time someone asks. 

4. Reconciliation that never quite matches 

You make a payment, it shows up in your bank account, and somehow it still does not match what your accounting software says. Now someone is spending an afternoon hunting for the discrepancy instead of doing actual finance work. Automatic reconciliation syncs payments across your accounting platform in real time; this is where the Forwardly Business Network earns its keep, matching payments and invoices automatically across connected accounts so reconciliation stops being a monthly fire drill. 

5. Invoice errors that delay payment 

According to the data, roughly 39% of invoices contain errors, whether that is a wrong PO number, a mismatched amount, or missing details. Every one of those errors stalls the payment until someone catches and fixes it manually. Automated three-way matching flags mismatches before payment goes out, so errors get caught in seconds instead of after the vendor calls asking where their money is. 

6. Vendor fraud and payment impersonation 

Fraud is not a one-day problem. 79% of organizations experienced attempted or actual payment fraud last year, and business email compromise, fraudsters impersonating a vendor or executive to redirect a payment, remains the most common method. Verified vendor records and payment controls that flag changes to bank details automatically beat trusting an email that says “new account, please update.” 

7. Paper checks that refuse to die 

Checks should feel like a relic by now, but 91% of organizations still use them, and checks remain the payment method most frequently hit by fraud. They are also slow, easy to lose in the mail, and impossible to track in real time. Instant payments and same-day ACH options move money faster and leave an actual audit trail, so you are not waiting on the postal service to know if you got paid. 

8. Missed early payment discounts 

Vendors often offer a discount for paying early, and slow manual approval cycles mean that the discount expires before the invoice even gets signed off. Worse, businesses that pay on immediate terms tend to grow faster: companies offering immediate payment saw 5% quarterly sales growth, more than double the 2% growth among those stuck on 90-day terms. Faster approval cycles mean you actually catch those discount windows instead of reading about them in the invoice’s fine print after the fact. 

9. Disconnected accounting and banking systems 

Your accounting software, your bank, and your payment processor often do not talk to each other, which means someone is manually exporting and importing data between systems and hoping nothing gets lost in translation. Native integration with platforms like QuickBooks Online and NetSuite Oracle keeps payments, invoices, and reconciliation in sync without a human acting as the translator between systems. 

10. Scaling invoice volume without scaling headcount 

As your business grows, invoice volume grows with it. 60% of finance teams already process more than 1,000 invoices a month, and adding headcount just to keep pace with paperwork is not exactly the growth story anyone wants to tell. Automation scales with volume instead of requiring you to hire another person every time the invoice count climbs. 

11. High processing fees are eating into the margin 

Wire transfers and card payments come with fees that add up fast, especially for businesses moving a high volume of B2B payments every month. Those fees are rarely visible until someone adds them up at the end of the quarter. Lower-cost payment rails like instant payments and ACH, combined with a platform that gives you visibility into what each payment actually costs, keep margin from quietly leaking out through transaction fees. 

The actual takeaway 

None of these problems is unique to your business. They show up at almost every SMB and accounting firm that is still running AP and AR manually, and they all share the same root cause: too much depends on a person doing repetitive work perfectly, every single time. 

The businesses that fix this are not necessarily the ones with the biggest finance teams. They are the ones who automate the repetitive parts and let their team focus on the work that actually requires judgment. 

Let Forwardly handle the busy work 

Forwardly automates AP and AR end to end, from AI-powered bill processing to automatic reconciliation, with faster payment options at the lowest cost and direct 2-way sync with leading accounting and ERP systems. Less time chasing invoices, more time running the business. 

Ready to see what that looks like for your team? Get in touch with Forwardly to start moving money smarter and faster.