5 AP Headaches TSPs Can Eliminate with Automated Accounts Payable Solutions

TL;DR

• What this guide covers: How automated accounts payable solutions help TSPs eliminate inefficiencies and protect margins.
• Why it matters: Manual AP creates risk, slows decisions, and drains profit.
• What you’ll identify: Hidden AP challenges that hurt scalability and financial visibility.
• What’s included: 6 common pain points, side-by-side comparison, and practical solutions.
• Who it’s for: Ops and finance leaders at MSPs, VoIP resellers, and cybersecurity firms.

As an ops or finance leader at a growing technology service provider (TSP), you’re facing rising vendor costs like licensing, infrastructure, and usage-based services, all while juggling disconnected systems and manual approvals. These outdated workflows quietly drain your margins and increase risk. 

Automated accounts payable changes that by aligning vendor spend with revenue and giving you full control over the AP process. In fact, 60% of companies cite manual entry and inefficiency as their top AP challenge.

With the right automation, you can accelerate approvals, prevent mismatches before they hit your bottom line, and scale without adding overhead. Let’s look at how most TSPs manage vendor payments today (and where things start to break down).

How Most TSPs Manage Their AP Process Today

If you're an MSP, VoIP reseller, or cybersecurity firm, you probably manage accounts payable using a mix of spreadsheets, emails, and disconnected tools. These homegrown workflows grow messy fast. Without standardization or oversight, visibility drops, approvals get missed, and reconciliation becomes a guessing game.

Do these processes hit a little too close to home? 

• Invoices arrive via email or are downloaded manually.
• A finance team member inputs them into a spreadsheet or accounting software.
• Approvals happen through email, Slack, or verbal sign-off, with limited tracking.
• Vendor charges are reconciled after the fact (if they’re reconciled at all).
• Payments are issued through separate platforms, without centralized oversight.

This patchwork process is common. However, it introduces friction, slows down decision-making, and makes margin control more difficult than it needs to be.

The Issues With Manual AP Workflows & How It’s Secretly Holding Your TSP Back

Sticking with manual AP might feel manageable now, but every new vendor, invoice, and service tier adds friction. The costs don’t always show up in your tools, but they pile up fast, draining margins, slowing your team, and exposing your business to risk.

Research shows organizations that automate their AP processes can reduce invoice processing costs by up to 80% and accelerate approval cycle times by 73%. Here's how manual workflows compare to automated ones:

Each of these improvements directly impacts your bottom line, risk posture, and ability to scale. Let’s break down the six biggest ways manual AP is holding your TSP back, and how automation helps you regain control:

1. Cash management and payment delays

When payments lag, it’s not just cash flow on the line. Delays ripple through your entire operation, putting vendor trust, service delivery, and client satisfaction at risk.

• 64% of mid-market companies experience late payments.
• These delays lead to missed early-payment discounts and strained vendor relationships.
• When you can’t pay vendors promptly, your service delivery is at risk.

2. Time drain and operational inefficiency

Every manual step in your AP process eats into your team’s time. For lean ops, that’s time you can’t afford to waste like slowing decisions, stalling growth, and pulling focus from higher-value work.

• Manual invoice processing takes an average of 10.3 days, over three times longer than automated systems.
• TSPs lose hundreds of hours a year on reconciliation, follow-ups, and approvals.

3. Error rates and fraud risk

Manual AP leaves too much to chance. When errors or fraud sneak past, they cause headaches and cut straight into your margins.

• 88% of AP documents contain errors, and 3.6% of invoices include overpayment risks.
• Manual AP systems are vulnerable to phishing, fake invoices, and altered bank details.

4. Compliance and security gaps

Without audit trails and proper controls, you're exposed to financial and reputational risk, especially in regulated industries.

• Manual AP lacks audit trails, approval hierarchies, and access controls required for standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS.
• Poor visibility into vendor spend increases the risk of missed audits and reputational harm.

5. High processing costs

Even if errors are rare, the hidden cost of processing each invoice manually chips away at your bottom line.

• Processing invoices manually costs between $6.10 and $15.97 per invoice, mostly due to labor.
• Factor in delays, rework, and late fees, and the impact on margins adds up quickly.

6. Vendor strain and limited scalability

Manual AP processes create friction that vendors feel, and over time, that friction limits your flexibility and growth. When your system can't support fast, reliable payments, the downstream impact is hard to ignore.

• Payment delays erode trust with your vendors and risk service disruptions.
• Manual AP doesn’t scale—month-end closes can lag by up to 15 days, limiting agility and decision-making.

A Better Way: Automated Accounts Payable Solutions For TSPs

Automated accounts payable solutions solve these issues with AI-powered, structured workflows designed to reduce manual effort and eliminate billing gaps.

With the right AP automation solution, you can:

• Auto-ingest vendor invoices (no manual input)
• Match each invoice to what was billed to the client
• Identify mismatches or overbilling before approval
• Route invoices through defined workflows with audit trails
• Push payments via ACH or card from the same platform

Rev.io’s AP Automation is embedded directly into its PSA platform. This allows you to manage billing, service delivery, and vendor payments in one place, without switching between tools.

By tying AP to your quote-to-cash process, you gain a real-time view of profitability and stop margin leakage before it starts. This level of visibility and control goes beyond payment processing to support smarter financial decisions. (Learn how to monetize your AP process while reducing complexity and vendor friction, too.)

Conclusion: Don’t Let Manual AP Hold Your Business Back

Hidden margin leakage, strained vendor relationships, and compliance risk are among the most common challenges technology service providers face when managing accounts payable manually. And, as your business grows, these issues scale with you.

If your AP process can’t keep up with your growth, it’s time to switch. Automation gives you control, clarity, and faster decision-making, without the manual cleanup. And when your AP lives inside your billing and PSA platform, everything just works better.

Book a demo to see how Rev.io helps TSPs shift from manual oversight to streamlined, scalable financial operations—all in one platform.

FAQs

How do I choose the best accounts payable automation solution? Look for a solution that integrates with your existing systems, supports invoice ingestion and reconciliation, includes approval workflows with audit trails, and aligns with your business model. For service providers, the best AP automation also ties vendor costs directly to client billing to preserve profitability. Read more here.

What is AP automation? Accounts payable automation is the use of software to streamline and digitize the process of receiving, approving, and paying vendor invoices. It eliminates manual data entry, speeds up processing times, and reduces errors and fraud risks.

How does AP automation work? AP automation tools capture incoming invoices, match them to purchase orders or billed services, route them through pre-set approval workflows, and trigger payments once approved. The process creates a digital audit trail and improves financial visibility across your organization.

How do TSPs benefit from AP automation? Technology service providers benefit from AP automation by gaining real-time visibility into margins, reducing manual reconciliation, improving payment accuracy, and streamlining compliance. It allows them to match vendor costs to client billing, eliminate billing gaps, and make faster, smarter financial decisions without adding overhead.