Costs and pricing

How the money moves

AP money moves in four streams: the cost of processing invoices, the cost (or income) of sending payments, the value of timing them, and what providers take in between.

Cost to process an invoice

APQC's cost to process one invoice runs from about $2 for top performers through about $6 at the median to about $10 for the bottom; Ardent's 2025 numbers are similar. At 50,000 invoices a year, moving from median to top saves about $200,000: real money, but small next to one fraud loss or a year of missed discounts.

Cost to send a payment, by method

Run the $25,000 invoice through each rail (US, interchange only; the supplier also pays its acquirer's markup and network fees):

The check, ACH and wire figures are 2021 survey data. At bank level, the Fed charges a fraction of a cent per ACH item and about a dollar per Fedwire transfer; what banks charge their customers isn't public. Cross-border is its own world: in the Financial Stability Board's 2025 data, a $20,000 small-business payment cost about 1.6% on average.

Card rebates

The US federal card program spent $39.4B in FY2025 and earned agencies $471M in refunds, about 1.2%. One multi-state cooperative contract with a large bank issuer, amended October 1, 2025, pays 135 basis points (1.35%) on standard volume, plus a prompt-payment rebate of up to 44 basis points that drops by one for each day the buyer leaves the balance unpaid, reaching zero at 45 days. I think rebates are priced across the whole program, and the issuer earns from how long the buyer takes to pay, but I still need an issuer to confirm. The card program prices the buyer's float to the day, and I don't think most AP departments price their own float at all.

Early-pay discounts

"2/10 net 30" offers 2% for paying 20 days early. That's 2/98 × 365/20, about 37% a year (45% compounded); "1/10 net 30" is about 18%. If the buyer's cash or credit line costs less, it should take it: $500 on the $25,000 invoice. But it has to approve within 10 days, which APQC's top quarter does and its bottom quarter doesn't. Dynamic discounting slides the discount by the day, from the buyer's own cash: at a 12% annual target, paying 20 days early earns 12% × 20/365, about 0.66%.

Supply chain finance

In reverse factoring the buyer confirms an invoice is valid, and a bank or platform pays the supplier early at a discount priced off the buyer's credit. The buyer pays the funder at maturity, often after stretching terms (say from 60 days to 90 or 120). The supplier gets cash cheaper than it could borrow, but pays the discount, often on top of longer terms. The buyer gets a higher DPO (days payables outstanding), no interest expense and, while it stays a trade payable, no debt on its balance sheet. The funder earns a spread plus fees. The catch, flagged by the IFRS Interpretations Committee in 2020: if the funder pulls out, months of extended payables fall due at once.

Hackett Group's 2025 survey of the 1,000 largest US public non-financial companies found DPO back up to 59 days in 2024. On the supplier side, the Credit Research Foundation's median DSO (days sales outstanding) was 37.5 days in Q2 2026, for a different set of companies.

How AP fintechs make money

Four revenue lines, usually combined:

1. Buyer software: subscriptions or per-invoice fees, sold on a lower cost per invoice.
2. Per-payment fees, often charged to the supplier for "enhanced" ACH or faster funds.
3. Card interchange, net of rebates. Some networks even refund suppliers part of the fee so they keep taking cards.
4. Interest on funds held between debiting the buyer and paying the supplier. Outsourced check printing moves the float to the provider: the buyer is debited at the run, the check clears days later.

Back to the distributor with 2,000 suppliers. If its AP network is "free" and 300 suppliers take the network's virtual card, most of the network's income comes from the card fees those 300 pay rather than from the distributor.

In the filings, interchange is a big part of the payment revenue. Float income shrank as the Fed cut rates through 2025, and the Fed's September 2026 rate rise props it up again. When a network says "we pay your suppliers for free", someone else is paying: the supplier through card fees, or the buyer through float it no longer earns.

How companies of different sizes use it

Nobody publishes AP spend by company size, so the spend figures here are my rough estimates from list prices, one buyer-data platform's contract medians and APQC's cost per invoice. I've used revenue bands because that's how the surveys cut them, but what really moves a company up in AP is how many invoices it handles and how many suppliers it pays. At every size above startup, the people time spent processing invoices costs several times the software.

A startup (under about $10 million of revenue) gets its bills as PDFs by email, and the founder or a part-time bookkeeper approves and pays them. A lot of its spend (software, cloud, contractors) goes on a corporate card and never touches AP. It pays bills from QuickBooks Bill Pay, Ramp's free plan or BILL. AP vendors don't hand out credits that run out, the way cloud providers do: the free tier is the startup program, and card fees and supplier fees pay for it. I haven't found dedicated startup offers from the AP vendors. My rough estimate is up to $5,000 a year on software, often nothing. It moves on when it adds an approver, the board asks for controls, bills outgrow the free ACH allowance or the auditors arrive.

A scale-up (roughly $10-100 million of revenue) hires an AP clerk or two, and a controller owns the process. It sets approval rules by amount and department, raises POs for inventory and hardware, and often adds another legal entity, such as a Canadian subsidiary. Many move off QuickBooks to NetSuite, Sage Intacct or Microsoft Dynamics around now, and that ERP move is often when they buy a real AP tool: BILL's higher tiers (ERP sync and two- and three-way matching), Ramp's paid plan or Tipalti, with Zip appearing at the top of the band. The bank becomes a treasury relationship, with Positive Pay and two people releasing each payment run. My rough estimate is $10,000-60,000 a year on software. Three-way matching across entities, preparing for an audit or IPO, or a fraud attempt on a bank-detail change pushes it on.

A mid-market company (about $100 million to $1 billion of revenue) has an AP team of several people, POs for most direct spend, three-way match, several entities and a written rail policy ("ACH by default, card under a set amount"). The distributor from the main players example sits here. It runs NetSuite, Dynamics or Sage Intacct (the larger ones Oracle or SAP), pays through an AP network built for this band (AvidXchange, BILL, Corpay, Tipalti or Ramp) and often adds a procurement suite such as Coupa. An AP manager runs the process under the controller, treasury owns the bank and card contracts, and procurement starts owning supplier onboarding. This is where the card program starts to matter more than the software license: the AP network often makes its software cheap or free and earns on the card fees suppliers pay. Card rebates help, but a company this size is well below the volume tiers in the big public card contracts. My rough estimate is $50,000-300,000 a year on software. SOX 404 (after an IPO or a sale to a public company), extra ERPs from acquisitions, a chief procurement officer, or card spend big enough to put the program out to bid push it on.

An enterprise (roughly $1-7.5 billion of revenue) runs SAP S/4HANA or Oracle Fusion, a procurement suite (SAP Ariba, Coupa or Ivalua), EDI with its large suppliers and an AP shared-service team. It sends one payment file to a bank's integrated payables service at JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, RBC or TD, and the bank routes each payment by rail and runs the supplier enrollment campaigns. It negotiates its card program, with rebates that rise with volume and fall the longer it takes to pay the issuer, and it can usually get supply chain finance: one US bank offers it to buyers with investment-grade or near investment-grade credit and large trade spend. The CFO owns the outcome, a controller and a shared-services lead run AP, the treasurer owns banks, cards and supply chain finance, and the chief procurement officer owns the suite. SOX 404 tests segregation of duties, and running supply chain finance brings the ASU 2022-04 disclosures. Fraud bites harder here too: in AFP's 2026 survey, larger organizations were more likely than smaller ones to lose money to it. My rough estimate is $300,000-2 million a year on software and bank services, and rebates and supply chain finance can offset a big share. What pushes it further has little to do with AP: acquisitions that add ERPs, a move to global shared services and the board's questions about fraud.

A Fortune 500 company (revenue above about $7.5 billion) runs several ERPs left from acquisitions, a global procurement suite, AP in shared-service centers or outsourced, and a treasury "payment factory" (one in-house hub that pays for every entity). It works with several banks for integrated payables, several card issuers at the top rebate tiers, several banks for supply chain finance, and networks such as Paymode, which says most of the Fortune 100 use it. Days payable outstanding is a number the board watches. A global process owner for procure to pay reports to the CFO, next to the treasurer, the chief procurement officer and the heads of shared services. Nacha's new fraud-monitoring rule started with the biggest ACH senders in March 2026, a few months before everyone else. My rough estimate is $2-10 million a year on software across ERPs, the suite and networks, with card rebates worth a good share of that. There's no next size up; the pressure comes from regulators, the board, and the risk that a supply chain finance program is withdrawn and months of stretched payables fall due at once.

What changes as a company grows (spend is my rough estimate):