AP Automation vendors are highlighted in a new SolutionMap category for our Spring 2020 release

“The AP Automation market is ‘hot, hot, hot’ in which vendors compete in a market that is growing and changing by the day,” Spend Matters’ Founder Jason Busch wrote in a recent Nexus article.

That’s why Spend Matters has added AP Automation technology rankings to the Spring/Q1 2020 SolutionMap release, which came out Tuesday. Six vendors demonstrated their solutions for Spend Matters, participated in a round of analyst scoring of their offering’s capabilities and were ranked according to feedback from their customers. (See details below about Basware, Coupa, SoftCo, Tipalti, Tradeshift and Yooz.)

Those vendors represent a trend that SolutionMap needed to capture, but you might be asking why this technology is developing now.

AP automation holds a lot of promise for businesses that want to optimize cash flow, reduce manual tasks and improve insights into transactions. It is considered a great stepping stone into invoice-to-pay (I2P) process automation, which stretches from invoice creation/receipt through validations and approval, all the way to payment. AP Automation represents a subset of these steps.

“Investment in this area is critical, not just for procurement transformation but also for supporting value creation across the whole business,” says Xavier Olivera, Spend Matters’ Lead Analyst for the Procure-to-Pay category.