The term “Accounts Payable” refers to businesses’ bills and invoices that their customers pay. A company’s Accounts Payable department is responsible for paying these accounts. In the early days of a business, it would be physically impossible to pay them all at once, so the Accounts Payable workflow automation involved writing down each invoice in a ledger book, calculating how much money was owed by subtracting the total amount of the invoice from the total amount of money that the business was currently holding and then paying the difference out of whatever account seemed most appropriate. This process was very time-consuming and prone to mistakes because it involved doing math, which is notoriously difficult even for people who are good at math, so many businesses would end up waiting way too long to pay some of their bills and some wouldn’t get paid at all. As with so many other industries over time, technology has been developed to streamline this process and make it far more efficient.

The official definition of Accounts Payable Workflow Automation is software that automates the accounts payable process for a business by taking information from an in-house system or an outside source (such as a vendor) and updating a database or spreadsheet with relevant information about each purchase order or invoice. The software will then