accounting
What is Accounts Payable?
Money your business owes to suppliers, vendors, and contractors for goods or services you've received but not yet paid for.
In plain English
Accounts payable (AP) is the flip side of receivables — your outstanding bills. Automating AP means using software to capture invoices (even from PDFs via OCR), route them for approval, schedule payments on optimal dates, and sync everything to your accounting system. This prevents missed payment deadlines, duplicate payments, and the hours spent manually entering bills. It also gives you better visibility into your upcoming cash obligations.