AP Automation in Canada 2020: A Global Comparison

As a follow-up to their Q1 Accounts Payable Process Survey, the Association of Certified Accounts Payable Professionals (ACAPP) once again surveyed global AP leaders in Q3 on their key challenges.

While 2020 has been a challenging time for finance teams, Q3 results further highlighted a trend we saw in Q1, Canadian companies are lagging behind global companies when it comes to AP Automation. Globally, 21% of companies reported having their AP systems fully automated, compared to 0% in Canada.

While 87% of Canadian companies have some level of automation, it is clear that there is ground to make up.

When we look at how this translated into the top pain points of Canadian companies, we see that the lack of automation also impacted critical supplier invoice processes.

In particular, Canadian survey respondents cited their top three challenges as:

• Dealing with Paper Invoices (20%)
• Lost or Missing Invoices (22%)
• Manual Data Entry (15%)

This all said, there is nonetheless a clear trend in Canada toward making spend automation a top priority in 2021. In fact, 68% of Canadian companies indicated that they were planning to change their current invoice management solution, whereas only 41% of companies globally are planning to do this.

This puts Canadian AP teams firmly in the driver’s seat in 2021 when it comes to technology adoption in their companies. Perhaps most importantly, it reaffirms the critical role Canadian finance teams will play when it comes to helping their business weather the unknown market challenges ahead. 

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