Elena Caruso spent eight years running AP for a 4,200-person manufacturer. We asked what she'd do differently starting over today.
On touch-per-invoice
Floowed: You've been critical of touch-per-invoice. Why?
Elena: It measures activity, not outcomes. A touch-per-invoice of zero on invoices that all get misposted is worse than one where a human caught the error. I care about posting accuracy and time-to-close.
What she tracks instead
First-pass match rate (and downstream correctness), exception resolution time, and accrual accuracy. The last one is the one nobody talks about — and the one auditors care about most.
What she wishes she'd known
"The hardest part of AP automation isn't the technology. It's getting your vendor master clean. Every exception that looked like an automation problem was actually a data quality problem."
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