Paperless Accounts Payable: How to Go Paperless, Even When Suppliers Do Not

Why listen to us: ECIT Digital turns paper and PDF invoices into clean data for finance teams every day. Paper is scanned by our partners, our AI reads every invoice, our people check what the AI is unsure about, and we guarantee 99.8% accuracy on the data we deliver.

I keep my personal paperwork in a shoebox. It is labelled "Important", which is optimistic, because nothing that has gone into it has ever come out again [it is a shoebox-shaped black hole].

Your AP team probably has a corporate shoebox too: a mail tray, a scanner nobody likes, and a filing cabinet of invoices from 2019. This guide covers how to go paperless properly, as one part of the accounts payable automation best practices, including the bits most guides skip: suppliers who keep posting paper, and what the IRS says about throwing the originals away [the shoebox is nervous].

Paper vs PDF vs e-invoice, at a glance

Not all "digital" invoices are equal. A PDF is just paper that learned to travel by email [it still cannot be read by your ERP].

What is paperless accounts payable?

Paperless accounts payable means no step in the process depends on a physical piece of paper: not intake, not approval, not payment, not the archive. That sounds simple, until someone asks where the signed invoice from March is [it is in the shoebox, it is always in the shoebox].

It does not mean your suppliers stop sending paper overnight. Ardent Partners found that "slightly more than half (51.4%) of all invoices are submitted electronically", so plenty still arrive in a form someone has to read first. As Ardent puts it, "Each paper invoice that must be scanned or manually entered represents time lost, risk incurred, and insight deferred".

Three ways in, one way through

The trick is to stop thinking about paper as a problem to eliminate, and start thinking about it as a format to convert at the door. Like a bouncer, but for envelopes [a very polite bouncer with a letter opener].

Every route ends in the same queue, in the same format. From there, approval, matching and payment do not care whether the invoice started life as paper, a PDF or an e-invoice.

Invoice digitization is not just scanning

This is where many paperless projects stall. A scanned invoice is a picture of an invoice, and a picture still needs someone to read it [my shoebox is full of pictures, metaphorically].

That is the difference between invoice digitization and digital invoice processing. The US government drew the same line when it defined e-invoicing as "a collection of structured data elements exchanged through electronic workflow".

Capture is the step that turns pictures into data, and our invoice scanning software does exactly that, with a person checking the fields the AI is unsure about.

What to do with suppliers who still send paper

Some suppliers will post you paper invoices until the heat death of the universe. You cannot fix them, but you can stop the paper at the door [gently, they mean well].

E-invoicing is the long-term fix. The Federal Reserve calls the e-invoice "a necessary first step to achieving straight-through processing". Our guides to what an e-invoice is and EDI invoices explain the options, including PEPPOL e-invoicing.

Approvals and payments without paper

Paperless intake is wasted if the approver still prints the invoice to sign it. Yes, people do this [I have seen it, I still have nightmares].

Our guide to the AP workflow covers who does what. And payments matter too: in the 2025 AFP Digital Payments Survey, organizations reported that 26% of their B2B payments are still made by check, down from 33% in 2022.

Every check you stop writing is one less envelope, one less stamp and one less "it must have got lost in the post" conversation.

What the IRS says about scanned records

The big worry with going paperless is the auditor. Good news: the IRS has had rules for scanned records since 1997, which is older than some of your interns [and all of my shoes].

Revenue Procedure 97-22 says that "Records maintained in an electronic storage system that complies with the requirements of this revenue procedure will constitute records". It also "permits the destruction of the original hardcopy books and records", once the business has tested its system and put controls in place.

The IRS small-business guide, Pub 583, adds that "All electronic storage systems must provide a complete and accurate record of your data that is accessible to the IRS". So scanning is fine, but the scans must be legible, complete, and protected from being changed.

So the shoebox can retire. Not because the paper is gone, but because a properly scanned, controlled archive is better evidence than a cardboard box under my desk [the shoebox has been informed].

How to go paperless, step by step

Going paperless in one weekend is how filing cabinets end up in car parks. Here is the order that works.

The US federal government did the same at scale. A 2015 OMB memo directs agencies "by the end of FY 2018, to transition to electronic invoicing for appropriate Federal procurements", after noting that agencies process "over 19 million invoices each year".

What we see in the field

From inside the pipeline, paperless AP looks a lot less like a paperless office and a lot more like a very efficient mailroom [the mailroom wants it noted that it is still needed].

• Paper never fully disappears. A share of suppliers keep posting invoices. Our partners scan them, and they join the same flow as PDFs and e-invoices.
• Clients never touch the document. Clean data lands in their ERP, AP workflow tool or property management system.
• A person stands behind the data. When our AI is unsure about a field, someone on our team checks it, which is how the 99.8% accuracy guarantee holds.
• E-invoices are the goal, not the starting point. Teams that wait for every supplier to send e-invoices wait forever.

Wondering what paper is costing you? Run the free invoice health check: it scores your invoice process in about 3 minutes and estimates what you could save, based on your own numbers.

As for my shoebox: I scanned everything in it last weekend. The scans are tidy, searchable and backed up, and the shoebox now holds shoes, which, I am told, is what it was for all along.