Invoice by invoice, the numbers add up. The average business spends $9.90 and 11.6 days processing a single invoice, and nearly one in five invoices, 19.9%, still needs manual exception handling before it can be paid. Only 38.3% of invoices move through the process straight through, without anyone touching them.
AP's role is expanding just as fast. Today, 66% of organizations rate AP as very or exceptionally valuable, and finance leaders expect the function to manage working capital, strengthen supplier relationships, and feed better data to procurement and treasury, not just keep invoices moving.
AI is becoming part of that shift. In 2026, 58% of AP organizations are using or piloting AI, most often for invoice capture and data extraction. Best in Class organizations are already pulling ahead: they link 85.1% of invoices to a purchase order, compared to just 46.9% among everyone else, and they spend roughly half the staff time answering supplier questions, 18.9% versus 31.1%.
Ardent Partners surveyed 194 AP, finance, and P2P leaders to find out where the function stands in 2026, what separates Best in Class performers from everyone else, and where AI fits into the next phase of AP's evolution.
What You’ll Get
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The 7 core AP performance benchmarks for 2026, including cost per invoice, cycle time, exception rate, straight through processing, PO linkage, supplier enablement, and time spent on supplier inquiries
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How Best in Class AP organizations outperform their peers, with side by side benchmark comparisons on each metric
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Where AI adoption actually stands today, from the 58% of teams already using or piloting AI to the 1% who have made it a core operating capability
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The top three priorities driving AP's 2026 agenda: reporting and analytics, process automation, and supplier enablement
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A practical framework for turning these benchmarks into a measurable performance plan for your own team
