Top tips to increase your Straight-Through Processing rate

Down The AP Arms with Xelix Co-founder, Paul Roiter this week is P2P consultant, Philip Spence. Phil shares step by step how he and his team took Straight-Through Processing (STP) from 18 to 60% during one of his transformation projects. 

Watch the episode ▶️

Phil's background

When Phil isn’t found in his favourite pub, The Wagon and Horses in Sturbridge, he’s overseeing major AP and P2P transformation projects, most recently redesigning a European Procure-to-Pay function that spanned 19 different countries. 

Setting the scene 

Following exponential growth via an acquisition-led growth strategy, Phil’s previous organisation experienced a huge increase in annual invoices, taking the total up to 650,000 per year. This marked a pivotal time to assess P2P process efficiency.    

After some analysis, Phil discovered that 82% of invoices processed required some kind of manual touch point. Recognising an urgent need for improvement, Phil outlines three key steps he took to boost the STP rate.

Step one: Achieving full workstream alignment  

During growth, it’s easy for collaboration to suffer as workloads increase. Phil explains that despite differing remits, everyone shared the same goal - get suppliers paid on time. 

“If the supplier isn't  paid on time, then there's a problem somewhere in the workstream - whether it's Procurement, Accounts Payable, Goods or Supply Chain, everyone needs to come together to understand not just what the problem is, but what the consequences are and how it works its way through the workflow and creates a non-payable invoice. 

“In my experience, it's always taken a lot more effort to retrospectively correct something than actually spend a little bit longer on the front end.” 

Phil shared that providing full visibility on the problem was more important than anything.  

“We just can't keep manually knife and forking invoices through. Yes, we might be paying vendors on time, but it's a bit like a swan - it might look serene above the water, but the work that was going on behind the scenes to get these invoices paid was quite furious.  

So, building that cross functional narrative as to the importance of this activity was vital” 

Step two: Analysing vendor capture 

The next step was to understand the ingestion rules of invoices and what was causing issues. 

 “We had to make sure our communications to our vendor base were very clear, in terms of our requirements. The gap we managed to bridge was being crystal clear on what it is that we required”. 

Phil noted that being firm with vendors when it comes to invoice ingestion is crucial. If an invoice doesn’t meet the standards, it requires significant additional effort from the team – reformatting, getting it into the ERP and then commencing approval workflows.

Step three: Setting incremental goals 

Overhauling any process can be a daunting task when observing it holistically, i.e. taking STP from 18% to 60% when you're processing c. 55,000 invoices a month.

Phil engaged his team by setting incremental goals and celebrating progress along the way.

“We observed that vendor #1 has three core issues and if we if we solve all of those, we'll move from 18% to 25%. 

Each week we would work through an error, some of which would be specific to an individual vendor, or in other instances, it was common across multiple vendors… and then we’d review as a team and take away designated actions.  

Being able to look back at the progress you have made gives you the motivation to keep going[...] It was vital to the success of the transformation.

I've grown up in a Shared Services environment where the mantra is always do a little bit more each year with a little bit less”. 

Business beagle or Phil Spence?

In true AP Arms style, we asked Phil to caption the below image relating to our STP chat down the pub. After highlighting the striking resemblance the Business beagle had to himself, Phil went on to create his P2P meme...   🥁🥁🥁

Watch the short video interview to get the full scoop. Huge thanks to Phil for joining us at The AP Arms and sharing some brilliant takeaways. 

Interested in popping in? Let us know – as a new establishment ‘round here, we’re always looking to welcome more guests!