Touchless invoice processing: what rate to expect, and why some invoices still need a person

Touchless invoice processing means an invoice goes from arrival to approval for payment without anyone touching it. Software reads the invoice and checks it against the purchase order, the goods receipt and the vendor record. The invoice stops and goes to a person only when a check fails. On average, AP teams process 35.4% of their invoices this way. The figure comes from Ardent Partners' State of ePayables 2025, a sponsored analyst report.

Touchless invoicing, no-touch processing and straight-through processing mean the same thing here. Straight-through processing is the wider term, used for payments, loan files and claims as well as invoices. An invoice is touchless when automated invoice processing runs every check and every check passes.

What counts as a touch#

A touch is any time a person opens an invoice to type in a value, fix one, check one or look one up. A glance at a dashboard doesn't count. Opening the invoice to confirm a PO number does. Write this rule down before you measure. Otherwise two people on the same team will count the same month in two different ways.

Decide separately how to count approvals. Ardent Partners' 2025 report says a PO invoice can go straight through if it passes every check and meets every rule you set. Then it's scheduled for payment with no person involved, not even an approver.

A non-PO invoice, such as a legal bill or a one-off repair, has no PO to match. Someone has to approve it. That's part of the process, not a failure. Count those approvals separately from AP touches. Then you can report two rates. The first is the share of invoices that no one in AP touched. The second is the share that no one touched at all, approvers included.

Always divide by every invoice you processed in the period. If you leave out paper invoices or credit notes, the rate goes up, but your team still does that work.

What a good touchless rate looks like#

Ardent Partners ranks AP teams by cost per invoice and processing time. Its top group is the 20% of teams with the lowest costs and the fastest times. That group processes 51.0% of its invoices straight through. All other teams process 29.0%. So even the best teams send about half of their invoices to a person.

Two other numbers from the same survey help explain the gap between 51.0% and 29.0%. The top group links 84.0% of its invoices to a purchase order, compared with 47.3% for the other teams. Also, 67.2% of the top group's suppliers send invoices electronically. For the other teams, that share is 47.3%, the same as their share of invoices linked to a PO. An invoice with a PO has something to be matched against. An e-invoice arrives as data, so nothing has to be read from a scan.

How high a rate can go depends on the kinds of invoices a team gets and the rules it sets. So compare your rate with teams that have a similar share of PO invoices.

How to measure your touchless rate#

Divide the invoices no one touched by all the invoices processed in the same month. Use the counting rule above, and count the same way every month. The calculator starts with example numbers, so enter your own counts.

One number for the whole team doesn't show where the touches come from. Split the rate by PO and non-PO invoices, by vendor and by channel, such as email, paper or e-invoice. Then sort the stopped invoices by the reason they stopped. A vendor that sends many invoices, half of which stop, causes more work than ten vendors with one stopped invoice each.

What an invoice needs to pass untouched#

An invoice goes through untouched only when every check passes. One failed check sends it to a person. For a PO invoice, these are the checks.

• A PO number that matches an open POThe number is printed clearly and points to an open order for this vendor.
• A vendor you already knowThe vendor and its remit-to address match your vendor master.
• A goods receipt in the systemFor a 3-way match, someone records that the goods arrived. That record, the goods receipt, must be in the system when the invoice is checked. If it isn't, the invoice waits.
• Every field above its confidence thresholdThe software gives each value it reads a confidence score. A value passes only if its score is above the threshold you set for that field.
• No earlier copyThe same invoice number from the same vendor hasn't been processed before. See duplicate invoice detection.
• Amounts within tolerancePrice and quantity differences from the PO and the goods receipt fall inside the limits you set.
• An approval rule that fitsIf a PO invoice passes every check and is within tolerance, your system approves it by a rule you set. Other invoices go to the approver the rule names.

Where each exception should go#

Ardent's survey puts the average invoice exception rate at 18.4%. That rate and the 35.4% touchless rate don't add up to 100%. An invoice with no exception can still need a person. One example is a non-PO invoice that someone assigns to a ledger account and approves by hand.

Each stopped invoice should reach the person who can fix the problem. That person needs to see the reason and the place on the invoice where the problem is, on one screen. The table shows the usual reasons, who should get each kind of stopped invoice, and how to fix the cause.

One invoice, stopped by one field#

Invoice NKE-9921 from Northeast Kitchen Equipment has 2 pages and 11 lines. The lines add up to the subtotal of $23,250.00. Sales tax and freight bring the total due to $24,650.00. The vendor is known, and the invoice number hasn't been seen before.

One field is different. The PO number, 5498, is written by hand. The software reads the PO number, but the confidence score for that value is below the threshold set for PO numbers. So the invoice stops. The software shows a reviewer the PO number and highlights where it appears on the invoice. The reviewer confirms 5498. The invoice then moves on to the PO match and approval like any other. That's one touch, caused by one field. The lasting fix is a note to the vendor asking for printed PO numbers. You can see this invoice's fields, with the handwritten PO number flagged for review, on our invoice OCR page.

Our take. Aim for a touchless rate where you know why each invoice passed or stopped, even if it isn't the highest rate you could reach. A lower threshold for PO numbers would have let NKE-9921 through, and it would let the next misread PO number through too. We'd keep the threshold. We'd also make each stopped invoice quick for a reviewer to fix, with the reason and the place on the invoice highlighted on one screen.

How to raise your touchless rate#

Start with the exception report, not the software settings. Each month, take the most common reason invoices stopped and fix its cause. If most stopped invoices are missing POs, talk to the buyers who order without one. If most come from new vendors, talk to the team that sets up vendors.

Then improve the invoices you receive. Ask your largest vendors to print the PO number, or to send e-invoices if you accept them. Keep your vendor master up to date, so that a known vendor's second address doesn't look like a new vendor. These steps raise the rate without letting more errors through.

Change the software settings last. Look at what reviewers corrected, field by field. A field that reviewers almost never change can take a lower threshold. A field they often correct needs a higher one, or a clearer copy from the vendor. Widen match tolerances only after your numbers have held steady for a few months.

Where Docsumo fits#

Docsumo is an intelligent document processing (IDP) platform for the invoice side of accounts payable. Docsumo reads each invoice, including its line items, whether the invoice arrives by email, by upload or through the API. Fields below the confidence threshold you set for them go to your reviewers. When a reviewer clicks a field, Docsumo highlights where the value came from on the invoice. When reviewers correct a value, the correction improves the model that reads your invoices. Docsumo also flags duplicate invoices.

On the Enterprise plan, Docsumo matches invoice lines to the PO and the goods receipt, and looks up values in your master data. On the Business plan, Docsumo routes invoices for approval by the rules you set. Approvers get email notifications, and an invoice not approved within the time you set is escalated. Docsumo doesn't pay vendors, and it doesn't supply a review team, so your own staff handle the exceptions. Docsumo sends the extracted and checked data to your ERP through API and webhooks. The steps are on the invoice processing software page.

The two figures below count documents that no one had to review. Neither one includes approval for payment, so don't compare them with Ardent's rates above. Valtatech is a source-to-pay provider in Melbourne. There, touchless means the operations team no longer types invoices in by hand, and only the exceptions go to a person (case study).

• 95%+95%+of documents processed straight through with Docsumo, without manual review
• 99%+99%+of supplier invoices processed touchless at Valtatech

If your touchless rate has stopped rising#

If your rate has stopped rising, the easy invoices probably already pass. The invoices that still stop tend to come from a few vendors and a few fields. Your exception report from last month shows which ones. Start there, one reason at a time.

Book a demo with a batch of the invoices that stopped last month, or start a free trial.

Frequently asked questions#