Accounts payable benchmarks often assume a company pays a manageable number of suppliers, but this is not always the case. According to Ardent Partners’ State of ePayables 2025 research, the average cost of processing a single invoice is $9.84 and the average processing time is 8.2 days. However, these figures are more relevant for companies with a few hundred vendors, not those with thousands.
A CEO at a digital PR and link building agency, which pays over 10,000 publishers in different countries and currencies, has a unique perspective on this issue. The agency, ESBO Ltd., has a small team of about 20 people, but its payables function is similar to that of a much larger company.
The Shape of the Problem
The problem of dealing with a large number of small vendors is not unique to ESBO Ltd. Marketing, content, logistics, and professional services have all led to an increase in spend towards large numbers of very small vendors, such as freelancers and single-site publishers. Finance teams often inherit this fragmentation without extra AP headcount and benchmark themselves against numbers that were never built for it.
Regulation is about to make this gap even more expensive. The European Union’s VAT in the Digital Age package, which entered into force in April 2025, will make digital reporting for cross-border business-to-business transactions mandatory by July 1, 2030. Domestic systems must align with the EU standard by January 2035.
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Lessons Learned
ESBO Ltd. has learned several lessons the expensive way. Firstly, the unit of cost is the supplier, not the invoice. Cost per invoice measures keystrokes, but what actually consumes the team is the relationship around it, including identity checks, tax status, and bank details. Ardent Partners found that AP staff spend 21.9% of their time dealing with suppliers.
Secondly, supplier enablement targets fail on the tail. The standard advice is to move suppliers onto a portal or format, but this does not work for small vendors who will not comply. ESBO Ltd. has stopped asking suppliers to comply and instead accepts whatever they send, doing the conversion on their side.
Thirdly, payment fragmentation costs more than payment fees. Every additional currency and rail creates its own reconciliation path, and the visible cost is the transfer fee. The real cost is the hours spent matching payments that landed short or clearing FX differences across hundreds of small transfers.
Lastly, fraud moves to the vendor master. When dealing with thousands of counterparties, the exposure is not a fabricated invoice, but a change of bank details on a genuine supplier account. ESBO Ltd. verifies banking changes on a fixed schedule rather than treating each request on its merits.
Practical Implications
For CFOs at larger organizations, the practical issue is how much of their spend already sits in the tail of small vendors. The answer is often hidden because reporting is organized by spend, but sorting by supplier count instead can invert the picture. The 2030 deadline applies to the records, not to the money, and the work that follows is slow and unglamorous.
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This involves deduplicating the vendor master, verifying tax identifiers, and deciding which small suppliers to consolidate behind an intermediary and which to keep direct. It also means accepting that a share of vendors will never send a structured invoice and designing for that instead of legislating against it.
Anyone planning to start this process in 2029 will find that the binding constraint is not the system, but how long it takes to get several thousand very small counterparties to answer an email.
Regulatory Compliance and Vendor Management
Member states are free to impose their own e-invoicing mandates. Several have already done so.
Verification of banking changes is done on a fixed schedule. This is because the request itself carries no signal at high volumes.
