Jun 2026
How Accounts Payable teams make time for higher value work
At every P2P conference we attend, we always hear how stretched AP and shared services teams are. Query volumes up, headcount flat, and somewhere in the background, a leadership message to "be more strategic." It's well-meaning but it's also hard to square with an AP helpdesk still processing the same types of vendor queries it was processing two years ago.
At the Procure to Pay network event, hosted by The Shared Services Forum UK, we ran a live benchmarking session with 40 shared services and P2P leaders to get closer to the real question: are AP teams busy with the right work?
Baseline → benchmark → best practice
The framework behind the session is simple enough: you can't benchmark without a baseline, and you can't drive best practice without a benchmark. For vendor query management, a useful baseline means consistently capturing first response time, resolution time, SLA attainment, escalation rate and why queries are arriving in the first place.
Only 31% of participants had full visibility into why their AP queries arise.
What root cause analysis actually tells you
Around 40% of queries are payment-status requests, around 30% are invoice disputes, and roughly 20% are statement reconciliation queries. Without root cause data, you can manage query volume. You can't reduce it.
What could your AP team do with 60% of their time back?
When you strip out payment-status queries and statement reconciliation queries, you're looking at potentially 60% of current helpdesk workload that could be automated or prevented entirely.
"If you could reduce resolution times by 60% whilst improving SLA performance to 90%+, what would that additional FTE capacity and supplier confidence be worth to your organisation?"
From the SSF UK benchmarking session
⚠ Title is a filing label — "How AP teams make time for higher value work" describes an outcome category, not the reader's actual situation. An AP leader scanning a resources feed doesn't know yet whether this is about headcount, software, or process. The specific hook, 60% of query volume being preventable, doesn't appear until six paragraphs in.
⚠ Conference-First Bias in the opening — "At every P2P conference we attend, we always hear..." centers Xelix's vantage point before the reader's problem. The reader doesn't arrive caring what Xelix hears at conferences. They arrive stretched, with query volumes up and headcount flat.
⚠ The strongest stat in the piece — only 31% of teams have root cause visibility — is delivered as a section finding, not as the hook. It's the single most quotable, most alarming number in the post, and it's buried under a methodology explainer about baselines and benchmarks.
⚠ The 60%-time-back framing, the actual payoff of the entire piece, is introduced as a rhetorical question asked in a conference room ("Nobody needed long to think about it") rather than stated as a direct claim to the reader. The reader has to do the math themselves to feel the size of the opportunity.
⚠ CTA "Get in touch" carries no ownership language and no connection to the specific gap just demonstrated. After reading about root cause blindness, the natural next CTA is something that addresses that blindness directly, not a generic contact link.
⚠ The compliance section (late payment reforms, board-level scrutiny) is strong, specific, and urgent, but arrives after the product pitch rather than before it. Regulatory consequence is a stronger opening hook for a finance-leadership audience than a benchmarking session recap.