Accounts payable has a more strategic role to play in GBS than most organizations are currently unlocking. With SAP Cloud ERP migrations reshaping finance operations, e-invoicing mandates arriving on fixed government timelines, and boards demanding AI results this quarter — not next year — AP is where all three pressures converge, and where the opportunity to act is greatest.
For most large, multi-market GBS organizations, AP fragmentation is the hidden constraint holding back performance. Duplicate processes running market by market. Compliance managed locally with no shared infrastructure. Invoice data that is too siloed to support AI at scale. The costs accumulate in ways that rarely surface on a single line of a budget report, but compound significantly over a two-to-three-year horizon.
Drawing on original research with FT Longitude (200 senior finance leaders, 2026), SSON benchmarking data and direct quotes from practitioners at Johnson Controls, Stripe and Basware, this guide explores how leading GBS organizations are using AP modernization to simplify SAP Cloud ERP migration, achieve compliance coverage across 60+ countries, and create the unified data foundation that makes agentic AI in finance a reality rather than a roadmap item.
Inside this report, you'll learn:
- How to use the SAP Cloud ERP migration window to modernize AP in parallel, and why waiting until post-go-live makes the problem harder, not easier.
- Why AP is the highest-confidence starting point for agentic AI in finance, and what organizations achieving real ROI are doing differently.
- How to baseline your AP operation against best-in-class benchmarks and build a CFO-ready business case for modernization.