Cost to process an invoice: where the figures come from

APQC states a median cost of $6.00 to process an accounts payable invoice, based on 5,846 organizations, and Ardent Partners states an average of $9.90. The figures AP vendors and blogs quote for manual processing run higher and wider, and most of the 22 pages lead with a figure from $5.83 to $40. Of the 22 pages that state a manual cost, 15 name a benchmark owner, 5 link to one, and 1 of those links reaches a page that states the figure. Eleven AP platforms put a manual cost on a page of their sites, listed below.

What the benchmark owners state

APQC’s own pages carry three medians: $5.83 in 2018, $6.00 in October 2026 and $6.50 on its benchmark page, with samples of 1,485, 5,846 and 6,546 organizations. APQC’s cost includes personnel, systems, overhead and other internal and outsourced costs, across the whole process. IOFM’s two cost-per-invoice articles sit behind membership, and neither shows a figure outside it.

What 22 articles and vendor posts quote

The 22 pages are 16 independent articles and 6 vendor pages. Each states a manual cost per invoice.

• $15 to $40 appears on 7 pages. One attributes it to Ardent Partners’ State of ePayables 2023, one repeats it from Adobe’s page, which names no source, and the other five name no source page.
• $12.88 appears on 3 pages, all attributed to Ardent Partners.
• Seven pages name Ardent Partners and quote six different figures for it: $9.40, $10.18, $12.42, $12.88, $12 to $15 and $15 to $40.
• Fifteen pages name APQC, IOFM, Ardent Partners, Levvel or Gartner. Five link to the owner, and the links lead to a homepage, PDF reports that did not open, APQC’s benchmark page, a members-only article and one readable page.
• The one readable page is the CFO.com article above, and it states $5.83, $2.07 and $10, the figures the linking page quotes.

Several figures also differ by measure. An “all others” figure of $12.42 or $12.88 is the average of teams outside the top-performing group. An average of $9.40, $9.90 or $10.18 covers every team, and a median of $6.00 sits lower than both.

What AP vendors say about manual cost

Where a vendor lists a full price, this site works out the software cost: Ramp’s cost record shows $1.60 an invoice and BILL’s shows $1.64 to $1.70, and the AP automation pricing index sets them beside the other platforms.

Medius, Corpay and Rillion quote only, so no computed figure exists to set against their manual numbers.

Payment fees make up almost all of Ramp’s $1.60 per invoice, as the bill pay fees comparison shows. Manual cost is not computed on this site, since no benchmark owner states a figure for the process a given team runs.

Using the figures

A team’s own cost for one invoice is the monthly cost of its AP staff, systems and overhead divided by the invoices processed in the month. The result is the number to set against a vendor’s list price, and the cost per invoice calculator and the volume pages, starting with 1,000 invoices a month, cover the software side at three volumes.

APQC’s $6.00 covers the whole process, including systems. The OCR invoice capture guide and three-way match guide cover the steps where manual cost builds up. Teams weighing a provider over software can read the AP outsourcing guide, where the rates are in the provider’s own units.