Accounts payable (AP) automation is no longer just a back-office efficiency play - it’s becoming a strategic driver for finance agility and control. Yet many finance teams struggle to fully adopt these solutions, stuck in manual processes and siloed functions.

In this interview, Vlad Stoian, VP Operations at Dynatos, discusses how the AP function has evolved from paper-based workflows to AI-powered automation over the past decade. He highlights the biggest challenges finance teams face balancing control, agility and growth, and why collaboration between procurement and accounts payable is essential to unlocking true automation and operational efficiency.

This conversation is part of our whitepaper The Evolving Role of the CFO, exploring how Norway’s top finance leaders are preparing for the future.

Vlad Stoian, VP Operations at Dynatos

Vlad, how has the finance function changed in the past five years, and where do you see it heading?

Vlad: When I first entered the industry in 2010, automation in finance was still relatively limited, but we had already seen significant changes since the 1990s. Back then, everything in AP was paper-based. Large companies handled hundreds of thousands of invoices per year, all delivered by post. There were teams of 10 or more people just to open mail, sort invoices and manually enter data into the ERP systems.

The 1990s brought the first wave of transformation with the introduction of OCR (optical character recognition) technology. Then in the early 2000s, we began to see the shift toward electronic invoicing. What really accelerated change was the introduction of open electronic invoicing networks like PEPPOL. That allowed more companies to adopt e-invoicing and reduce their reliance on paper or PDFs.

This shift had a massive impact. OCR still requires human validation, but with true e-invoicing, invoices are received directly to the ERP in structured format. There’s no need to scan, read or verify basic data manually. In countries like Norway, electronic invoicing penetration has now reached 70–80%, which drastically cuts down processing time. The AP department of today is a fraction of the size it was 15 years ago and rightly so.

Over the past five years, we’ve entered a new phase. Companies are no longer just digitising invoices - they’re automating the accounting logic behind them. AI tools can now recognise and suggest general ledger (GL) codes based on invoice line items. Invoices are received, accounted, matched and approved, all without human intervention. That’s where we’re heading: full touchless processing.

But this level of automation isn’t universal. In North America, the focus has been more on Source-to-Pay (S2P) and Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) processes than on standalone AP automation. Meanwhile, in Asia and parts of Eastern Europe, many companies are still working with paper-based systems or at best PDF-based invoices. Some countries like India, skipped the OCR phase entirely and went straight from paper to e-invoicing.

The next frontier is automation beyond AP - tying invoices to other documents like purchase orders, delivery notes and even emissions data. Imagine extracting CO₂ data per invoice line item and enriching invoices with that information automatically. That’s now possible with AI, and it’s something that ERP systems today can’t do natively.

In short, the role of AP is evolving from a reactive, back-office function into a strategic data hub - one that not only processes invoices and payments but provides insights into spend, supplier behaviour and even ESG metrics. That’s a radical transformation from where we were just a decade ago.

What’s the biggest challenge you see finance teams facing when trying to balance control, agility and growth?

Vlad: The biggest challenge is the willingness to actually onboard solutions that can do the job. That’s it. Companies today aren’t prioritising modern solutions that can improve these steps for them. Instead, they’re focusing on ERP upgrades and not looking into electronic invoicing or AP automation, and that’s a huge miss.

Over the years, I’ve spoken with a lot of large companies. I’ve tried to introduce electronic invoicing, show them how much better their process could be and they just don’t prioritise it. They’re not putting focus on something that could really improve their operations. AP solutions are just not seen as important because the focus is always on the ERP automation, but ERPs have lagged behind in this area.

And the reason? AP doesn’t have enough mandate inside the company. It’s still the IT department that drives decisions and IT doesn’t understand the actual pain points in AP or P2P process. IT is focused on security, infrastructure, moving ERPs to the cloud, which is important, of course, but it completely misses where a lot of the cost and inefficiency still exists.

So that’s what I see as the biggest challenge: the AP team doesn’t have enough influence to drive change and the problem isn’t big enough on paper to get executive attention. It’s not seen as a major pain point, but that’s exactly why it doesn’t change. It becomes business as usual. AP is often the last department to be automated.

With AI and automation evolving so quickly, what’s one thing finance leaders should stop doing and one thing they should start doing?

Vlad: What they should stop doing is manually processing paper-based or PDF invoices. That’s a no-go today. If you're still doing that, you're not even in the game. The first and most important step is to move to full electronic invoicing. Until you do that, you can’t really do anything else.

Next, finance leaders need to start looking into solutions for automatic GL accounting. There’s absolutely no reason for someone to be coding the same invoice twelve times a year, every month, again and again. It’s the same invoice, the same data, the same supplier. That’s a huge waste of time, and it’s unnecessary now.

The third piece is to improve collaboration and automation across your S2P and P2P processes, because you’re never going to eliminate manual invoice handling unless procurement and finance are working together.

If you start the right way - onboarding vendors with clear rules, setting up contracts that say “you must send us electronic invoices,” or “you must include a PO number” - you’re creating the structure that enables automation. Sourcing and procurement automation are key to enable automatic invoice processing. Companies should aim for as high as possible PO backed invoices that can be automatically matched and processed.

It all starts with moving away from paper and PDFs, removing manual coding and getting your P2P process in order. Those three things, if you do them right, you won’t need an AP team to touch every single invoice anymore.

What do you think are the biggest misconceptions companies have about AP automation?

Vlad: One of the biggest misconceptions is this idea that every single invoice needs to be handled manually, especially when it comes to approval. We see it all the time - companies insisting that even a €100 invoice has to go through two or three layers of approval. You really don’t need that.

Let’s say you have a phone bill or electricity invoice, those fixed, recurring invoices. You get the same amount from the same supplier every single month and yet companies are still processing them manually. Same coding, same approvals, every month. It makes no sense.

The problem is often in the lack of flexibility in their AP policies. There’s a blanket rule in place: all invoices must be coded, and then approved by one, two, sometimes three people, depending on the amount. But that policy doesn’t adapt to reality. It doesn’t differentiate between a one-off supplier invoice and a recurring utility bill.

What we’re recommending to customers is simple: set smart thresholds, procure from contracts, make use of POs and improve your PO-invoice match, contract-invoice match. For example, for invoices under €1,000, especially recurring ones, you don’t need to send them through a full approval workflow. They can be automated.

The idea that every invoice, no matter how small or predictable, needs manual approval, that’s a mindset we really need to change. Because it slows everything down and blocks companies from reaching true automation.

AP automation often only comes up when things start to break down. How can teams stay ahead and avoid getting stuck in firefighting mode?

Vlad: In the past, procurement and AP were separated functions with little collaboration in between. But now, we see that these two functions are more closely related and collaborative, and sourcing can actually help automate the AP function even further. This is how you can proactively stay ahead, but optimising together for automation.

Beyond saving time, where do you see automation making the biggest difference to finance teams?

Vlad: By adopting modern technology for invoice processing in areas such as AI based OCR, e-invoicing, AI based accounting companies can improve their data quality, enrich the data to ERP and get more out of the data that is provided on financial documents.

AP automation provides many obvious benefits for companies besides saving time; reducing errors, improving data quality and cutting the overall processing cost. In addition, companies can gain more control and better overview of their value chain operations by linking more financial documents together with the invoice document: orders, delivery notes, custom declarations.

With the standard paper/PDF based processes, companies oftentime only gather a limited amount of data back to the ERP. By making use of the power behind AI tools and electronic documents, companies have the capability of collecting (enriching) more data that can be used in improving their S2P process.

AP and S2P automation enables companies to work more strategically with the data rather than spending time processing data.

Editor’s Note:

This interview has been adapted from a recorded conversation. It has been lightly edited for clarity, flow, and readability, with filler words and repetitions removed. Every effort has been made to preserve the intent, tone and insights shared by the speaker.