Release note: Accounts Payable (AP) Automation is new for the Spring/Q1 2020 SolutionMap

Spend Matters is pleased to announce the debut of a new SolutionMap category — AP Automation — for today’s Spring/Q1 2020 SolutionMap release. AP Automation has been released in addition to the Invoice-to-Pay SolutionMap ranking and 11 other technology categories. This release note provides SolutionMap Insider subscription members with details about the evaluation process.

Six vendors are ranked in the category for this release, when SolutionMap is shifting from quarterly updates to spring and fall updates. This is the last quarterly release and the first spring release, so you’ll see it labeled “Spring/Q1.”

This category undergoes the same rigorous two-part process where Spend Matters’ analysts compare vendors by examining hundreds of solution capabilities and ranking vendors according to feedback from the providers' own customers.

AP Automation includes solutions and services that support the processing and payment of invoices. These solutions include e-invoicing capabilities such as invoice capture and digitization, invoice validation, invoice matching, GL coding and approvals. They also support payment-related functionality for payment file creation, mass payments (p-card, check, ACH, FX), one-time payments (v-cards, PayPal), payment reconciliations, credit memo management, trade financing (early payment and dynamic discounting) and payment transmission (including cross-border). Solution vendors may also provide some level of supplier management and supplier collaboration via supplier networks and/or portals.

AP automation is a major portion of the Invoice-to-Pay (I2P) technology market and will be harmonized with the broader I2P SolutionMap category in the future. For now, it will be considered a standalone map.

For this Spring/Q1 2020 release, three existing SolutionMap participants expanded their categories to include AP Automation, and three vendors in the AP Automation category are new to SolutionMap. If an existing provider expanding into AP Automation had previously received Invoice-to-Pay customer references, they were applied to the AP Automation category. The set of AP Automation customer references had 15 new individual customer references for this release.

The new providers are:

* SoftCo
* Tipalti
* Yooz (participated in I2P in past SolutionMap cycles)

Those providers expanding into AP Automation are:

* Basware (also participating in P2P)
* Tradeshift (also participating in P2P)
* Coupa (also participating in S2P and CW/S)

All readers can get a first look at the free Spring/Q1 2020 SolutionMap rankings here.

SolutionMap Insider members can learn more about each vendor in the Spring/Q1 2020 Provider Scoring Summary reports right here.

Read the full release note for more details on the evaluation process.