By Alex Mifsud, CEO & Co-founder, Weavr
Accounts Payable (AP) has long been regarded as a purely operational function – necessary, but not necessarily strategic. That view is starting to be challenged. What has been long acknowledged for enterprise supply chains also holds for smaller businesses: relationships of high mutual trust and value with suppliers has a high impact on business success. It is also hard won and easily lost. B2B software and services firms – ranging from accountancy applications to business process outsourcing and automation firms – are increasingly looking at AP as a critical business tool for optimising economics (such as securing early payment discounts) as well as developing trust (through timely and reliable payments to valued suppliers). For product leaders, AP presents a largely overlooked opportunity to add value, reduce operational drag, and even create new monetisation pathways.
The Hidden Costs of Traditional Accounts Payable
Despite increasing digitalisation in other areas of business operations, many AP processes remain heavily manual. Finance teams – especially in small businesses that do not have access to sophisticated corporate banking and cash-management facilities – still find themselves copying data between systems, rekeying invoice details, chasing approvals via email, and manually uploading payment files.
The consequences are not trivial. 60% of AP professionals still manually input invoices into ERP or accounting systems, according to SAP Concur’s 2024 report. Errors are frequent, and supplier payments can be delayed by up to three days even after approval. 86% of SMEs still rely on manual data entry for AP, despite its known inefficiencies.
These issues aren’t just internal inconveniences – they have knock-on effects. Late payments damage supplier relationships and reputations. Poor visibility over liabilities impacts forecasting. And fragmented processes increase the risk of fraud.
All of this adds up to a growing consensus: AP, as it stands, is too inefficient for the needs of modern business.
What the Market Is Telling Us
At Weavr, we recently surveyed UK-based AP professionals to better understand how they perceive the systems they work with – and what they want from future solutions. The results were telling:
- 94% want the ability to make payments directly from within the software they already use to manage invoices
- 86% would be willing to pay more for this level of integration
- 82% use two or more systems to complete their AP tasks
- 72% flagged human error in data entry as a major concern
- 21% cited frustration with having to export and re-import data manually across platforms
These figures reflect a clear pattern: the disconnect between invoice approval and payment execution is more than a technical gap. It’s a persistent source of operational drag.
Embedded Finance as Infrastructure, Not Add-On
This growing dissatisfaction is part of a broader shift in how we think about software infrastructure. Financial functionality – such as payments, accounts, and reconciliation – has traditionally existed outside the core user experience of most SaaS platforms. This model may have sufficed when financial operations were the domain of banks and external systems, but it’s increasingly at odds with user expectations and business realities. In many ways, it’s easy to draw a parallel with, say, consumer taxi hailing apps before and after Uber. AP’s Uber moment is certainly overdue.
What we’re seeing now is a growing preference for workflows that don’t just surface financial data, but enable financial execution within the same environment. Our recent launch of Embedded Payment Run (EPR) in partnership with Paperchase – a leader in hospitality accounting – demonstrates this shift in practice. For businesses in fast-paced sectors like hospitality, where cash flow and supplier relationships are especially sensitive to delay, embedding payments into the Accounts Payable process can be transformative. It’s no longer about feature sets – it’s about fitting technology to the tempo and needs of the business.
Instead, product leaders are beginning to consider financial execution – such as supplier payments – as something that should happen within their platforms, just as messaging, analytics, or scheduling already does.
This is not about adding fintech features for the sake of innovation. It’s about aligning product capabilities with real business needs.
What This Means for SaaS Product Strategy
For SaaS leaders and their product teams, this shift opens up a number of strategic considerations:
- Platform relevance: Embedding financial capabilities into your product keeps you closer to your users’ full workflow, reducing drop-off and increasing platform reliance
- Operational value: Supporting finance teams in executing payments isn’t glamorous, but it’s impactful. The value lies in what it removes – manual processes, risk, inefficiency
- Future-readiness: As procurement, expense, and accounting platforms increasingly absorb financial execution, expectations will rise across categories. The companies that anticipate this shift will be the ones shaping it
Reframing the Opportunity
It’s easy to dismiss Accounts Payable as just another compliance-heavy, back-office function. But the truth is, it touches every part of a business – every supplier relationship, every departmental budget, every audit trail. When treated strategically, it offers an opportunity to improve cash flow visibility, reduce costs, and build trust.
More importantly for SaaS builders, it’s an opportunity to move their product from helpful to essential.
To do that, they have to stop thinking of payments as something that belongs outside their application – and start designing software that reflects how businesses actually work.
Want to see how embedded payments can elevate your product?
Book a 15-minute call with one of our experts to explore how embedding AP functionality can reduce operational friction and create new value for your users.
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