UPDATED MAY 2026
Accounting departments have always been expected to keep the business steady. They close the books, pay vendors, reconcile accounts, protect cash, and keep records clean. That work has never been small, but the pressure around it has changed.
Controllers are being asked to move faster, provide better visibility, support smarter decisions, and strengthen controls without always getting more people to help. At the same time, talent remains tight. The field is expected to generate roughly 124,200 openings annually through 2034, and most from attrition, not growth.
Improving your accounting department isn’t about squeezing more work out of the same team. It’s about building better structure, cleaner invoice-to-payment processes, stronger visibility, and fewer manual workarounds.
For many teams, AP is where that pressure shows up first. Invoices arrive from every direction, approvals stall, payment questions pile up, and accounting is left piecing the story together across inboxes, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems.
Here are 10 practical ways to build a stronger, more efficient accounting department.
Reconciliation gets much harder when it becomes a year-end scramble. Waiting too long forces your team to dig through old transactions, chase missing documentation, and reconstruct what happened after everyone has already moved on.
A monthly rhythm keeps issues smaller, fresher, and easier to resolve. It also gives controllers a more accurate view of the business throughout the year instead of waiting for a major cleanup effort at close.
When accounts are reviewed regularly, reporting becomes less reactive and more reliable.
Cutoff policies are important, but they only work when people understand them and follow them. A policy buried in a shared drive doesn’t help much when invoices, reimbursements, or approvals keep showing up after deadlines.
Accounting teams should make cutoff expectations clear, visible, and repeatable. That means setting rules for when invoices must be submitted, which approvals are required, what supporting documentation needs to be attached, and how exceptions will be handled.
This is especially important for controllers because late submissions can create a domino effect. One delayed invoice can impact accruals, reporting accuracy, vendor relationships, and close timelines.
A strong cutoff policy protects the accounting calendar and helps the broader business understand what accounting needs, when it needs it, and why it matters.
Many accounting teams jump straight to approval delays when they think about process improvement. That makes sense because stuck approvals are visible and frustrating. But approval problems often start earlier.
When invoices arrive through multiple inboxes, PDFs, mail, screenshots, vendor portals, and side conversations, the team starts from a messy place. By the time the invoice reaches an approver, someone may have already spent time figuring out what it is, who owns it, whether it’s complete, and where it should go.
Standardized intake gives accounting a cleaner starting point. It helps ensure invoices enter the process with the right supporting details, coding information, vendor data, and routing logic.
Many finance teams turn to automation as the next step once invoice intake is more consistent. Automation can help capture invoice data, route work to the right approvers, and reduce the need for accounting teams to babysit every handoff.
Spreadsheets are useful. Spreadsheet side quests are the problem.
Most accounting teams use spreadsheets for good reasons: quick analysis, temporary tracking, reconciliations, reporting, or one-off requests. But when spreadsheets become the main place where invoice status, approval notes, vendor details, or payment timing live, visibility starts to break down.
The risk isn’t the spreadsheet itself. The risk is that it becomes a parallel process.
When accounting teams rely on disconnected spreadsheets, they spend more time checking versions, validating data, and answering status questions. That work adds up, especially in AP, where every extra touch increases cost and delay. Ardent Partners research puts the average cost to process a single invoice at $9.40, with cost drivers like data entry errors, invoice discrepancies, poor routing, and slow approvals.
That number may sound small until invoice volume climbs. A few extra minutes per invoice can become a very real cost when teams process thousands of invoices each month.
Accounting teams need time to stay current because the rules around the work keep changing. Tax requirements shift, fraud tactics evolve, and new technologies introduce fresh questions around controls and compliance. Staying current is part of protecting the business, not something to squeeze in after everything else is done.
The challenge is that research often gets squeezed by urgent tasks. When the day is filled with invoice follow-up, manual entry, payment questions, and reporting requests, staying ahead becomes harder.
Controllers can help by building compliance review into the team’s operating rhythm. That might include a monthly review of policy updates, a quarterly controls check, or a recurring review of vendor setup, bank account changes, approval rules, and payment procedures.
Accounting teams produce a lot of reports, but not every report helps the business make better decisions.
Some reports exist because someone asked for them years ago. Some get copied into different formats for different departments. Some take hours to produce, but only minutes to skim. Over time, reporting can become more about assembly than insight.
A more effective approach starts with the decision the report should support. Instead of building reports around familiar formats, accounting teams should focus on the questions leadership actually needs answered, whether that’s cash timing, vendor exposure, aging balances, accrual accuracy, budget variance, invoice volume, approval bottlenecks, or payment status.
Better reporting starts with cleaner data, but it becomes valuable when it helps the business act.
A team can feel busy and still struggle to prove whether the process is improving. That’s why controllers need process metrics, not just financial outputs.
For accounting and AP teams, useful metrics include:
These metrics help identify where work gets stuck. They also help leaders separate symptoms from root causes.
For example, a slow close may not be a close problem. It might be an invoice intake problem, an approval ownership problem, or a vendor documentation problem that shows up at close. Without process metrics, the team may keep fixing the same issue every month without seeing the pattern.
That visibility gives controllers a clearer way to prioritize improvements and make the case for change.
Fraud prevention is no longer just a treasury or an IT concern. It’s an accounting process concern.
Fraud often enters through everyday workflows: vendor setup, bank account changes, invoice approvals, payment release, email requests, and urgent exceptions. That makes accounting teams a key line of defense.
The risk is real. According to the 2026 Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report, 76% of U.S. organizations experienced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2025. Checks also remained the most targeted payment method, with 58% of organizations reporting check fraud.
Strong controls should focus on the points where money, data, and approval authority move. That includes vendor verification, separation of duties, approval thresholds, documentation requirements, and clear audit trails.
Manual review has a role, but manual review without visibility can create a false sense of control. A stronger AP process gives teams more context before money leaves the business, especially when approvals, supporting documents, vendor changes, and payment history are connected and traceable.
Automation shouldn’t be framed as replacing accounting expertise. The real value is freeing people from repetitive, low-value tasks so they can focus on work that requires judgment.
Deloitte found that 64% of finance leaders plan to prioritize AI, automation, and data analysis capabilities among their teams in the coming year. That shift matters because accounting teams aren’t being asked to do less. They’re being asked to do more valuable work with better tools.
That’s the opportunity for accounting departments. When software handles the repetitive parts of invoice capture, routing, matching, and status tracking, the team can spend more time reviewing exceptions, analyzing trends, improving controls, and supporting business decisions.
The key is to avoid automating broken processes exactly as they are. Start by identifying where work gets delayed, duplicated, or lost. Then use automation to create a cleaner process around those moments.
Accounting is at its best when it helps the business move with confidence. But when the team has to chase missing invoices, clarify approvals, or clean up documentation after the fact, it becomes harder to play that strategic role.
With cleaner data, better visibility, and fewer manual handoffs, accounting can spend less time tracking down answers and more time helping the business make informed decisions. When invoice status, approval history, supporting documents, and payment details are easier to find, the team can answer questions faster and spot issues earlier.
Accounting has always had the data. The next step is making that data easier to trust and easier to use.
The strongest accounting departments don’t get there by asking their teams to chase more, track more, or manually connect the dots across every invoice, approval, document, and payment. They get there by building processes that are easier to follow, easier to measure, and easier to trust.
That’s where onPhase can help. By bringing more structure, visibility, and control to AP processes, onPhase helps finance teams reduce manual work, strengthen approvals, organize supporting documentation, and keep every payment tied to an invoice, an approval, and a paper trail.
To keep improvement going beyond go-live, check out our recent article, Beyond Go-Live: How CFOs Drive ERP Transformations That Last.