AP cost and benchmarks
Per-page invoice pricing is a tax on your W-9s
If your AP tool bills per page, you pay for every certificate of insurance, every multi-page statement, and every document a vendor attached to be helpful. Here is the arithmetic.
A pricing model is a statement about what a vendor thinks the work is. Per page says the work is reading paper. Per invoice says the work is producing a coded, posted transaction.
Those are not the same job, and in property management the gap between them is enormous, because a huge share of what arrives in an AP inbox is not an invoice at all.
Roughly a third of an AP inbox is not an invoice
Go look at your AP inbox for one morning and sort what is in there. In a multifamily portfolio you will find, roughly in order of volume:
Real single-page vendor invoices. Multi-page statements with one invoice somewhere inside. Batch PDFs where a vendor stapled 9 invoices for 9 properties into one file. Handwritten invoices from field vendors, photographed slightly crooked. W-9s. Certificates of insurance. Delivery notes and packing slips. Month-end statements that summarize invoices you already paid. And a certain number of replies that are just the word "attached" with nothing attached.
Under per-invoice pricing you pay for group one, and the rest is the tool's problem.
Under per-page pricing you pay for all of it.
2,665 invoices produced 5,495 billable pages
ResProp's legacy solution charged per page. At their portfolio size it was on track for nearly $10,000 a month.
Here is why a per-page bill inflates so fast. Take 2,665 invoices in a month and put realistic page counts on them:
| Document type | Count | Pages each | Pages billed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single-page invoices | 1,700 | 1 | 1,700 |
| Multi-page invoices | 600 | 3 | 1,800 |
| Batch PDFs | 120 | 8 | 960 |
| Statements (not payable) | 150 | 5 | 750 |
| W-9s and COIs | 90 | 2 | 180 |
| Packing slips, misc | 105 | 1 | 105 |
That is 2,665 invoices and 5,495 billable pages. Slightly more than 2 pages billed per invoice produced, and about 1,035 of those pages are documents you were never going to pay against.
You are being billed to read your own compliance paperwork.
Vendor document habits are structural, not a discipline problem
The obvious response is to tell vendors to send one invoice per PDF, no attachments, no statements.
That does not survive contact with the vendor list. You have hundreds of vendors, most of them small trades operating out of a truck, and their document habits come from whatever their accounting software does by default. A landscaping company with 4 employees is not restructuring its billing because your AP tool has an unusual pricing model.
And the compliance documents are not optional. You require the certificate of insurance. You require the W-9 before you can pay anyone. The vendor attaching them to the invoice email is the vendor doing what you asked.
So the volume is structural. It is not a discipline problem you can manage away.
Per-invoice pricing only works if the tool splits and filters
Charging per invoice instead of per page only works if the tool actually handles the mess, otherwise the vendor just loses money and raises the price later. Two capabilities carry it.
First, splitting. A batch PDF has to be detected and broken into individual invoices with pages assigned to the right one. In BillRoute a human approves that split rather than the system doing it silently, which was a deliberate choice: an 8 page batch across 9 properties assigned wrong is nine miscoded invoices, and finding that at close costs more than the 20 seconds of review.
Second, filtering. Non-invoice documents have to be recognized and routed out. W-9s, insurance certificates, statements, delivery notes. They should land somewhere retrievable, not in the payable queue and not on the bill.
The handwritten ones matter here too, and they are the case most tools quietly fail. A field vendor's handwritten invoice is a real payable that has to be read and coded. It is also, at 1 page, cheap under per-page pricing and expensive under per-invoice pricing. So a vendor charging per invoice has a real incentive to read it correctly rather than punt it to your error queue, which is roughly the incentive you want them to have.
$1,505 against a $10,000 month, with the caveat stated
BillRoute is $99 a month plus $1 per invoice uploaded. On the volume above, 1,406 uploads, that is $1,505.
We sell one of these, so treat the specific comparison with the suspicion it deserves. The part that is not a sales argument is the unit. Ask any AP vendor two questions:
- Am I billed per page, per invoice, per document, or per user?
- What counts as billable when a vendor sends me a statement, a W-9, or a batch of 9 invoices in one file?
The second question is the one that produces the interesting silence.
Divide last month's page count by your posted invoices
Pull last month's page count from your current tool. Pull last month's posted invoice count from your PMS. Divide.
If the ratio is near 1.0, per-page pricing is costing you nothing much and you can stop reading. If it is 2.0, half your document spend is going to paper that was never payable, and that is a line item you can actually go remove.
What is your ratio?
Keep reading
AP cost and benchmarks
What does it actually cost to process one invoice?
Most AP cost-per-invoice numbers are built to sell software. Here is the arithmetic with the assumptions visible, including the lines vendors leave off the slide.
AP cost and benchmarks
Slow AP costs you twice: the discounts you miss and the late fees you pay
A 2/10 net 30 discount is a 36% annualized return on paying early. Most portfolios cannot take it, because approval takes longer than ten days.
AP cost and benchmarks
A duplicate payment costs about four times the invoice to recover
The same invoice arrives by email and gets re-sent on a statement. Both get paid. Getting the money back takes a vendor's cooperation you may not have.