Month-end close has long been a strain on finance departments—especially for Accounts Payable (AP) teams buried under manual processes. For enterprises managing complex procurement across distributed systems, the pressure intensifies. Time, accuracy, and control collide in the final days of every month. And too often, AP professionals are left scrambling to meet deadlines while navigating outdated workflows.
Ascend’s platform, built specifically to automate the invoice to pay process, offers a disciplined, modern solution. Through intelligent automation and deep integration with Workday Financial Management, Ascend helps large organizations close the books faster, with fewer errors, and far less administrative fatigue.
Finance professionals understand that closing the books is not simply a matter of hitting “submit.” It’s a rigorous, recurring orchestration of approvals, validations, reconciliations, and postings. Delays in AP workflows introduce downstream risk to reporting accuracy, cash flow visibility, and vendor relationships.
Most bottlenecks stem from three entrenched issues:
Manual Invoice Entry – Requiring hours of repetitive work, it’s an easy entry point for data errors and misclassification.
Disparate Systems – Fragmented processes across platforms limit visibility and create reconciliation blind spots.
Delayed Approvals – Approvers often rely on incomplete or inconsistent data, leading to costly hold-ups.
Ascend addresses all three by streamlining the flow of information and automating tasks that were once dependent on overextended human capacity.
AscendAP, the company’s flagship automation product, has dramatically reduced processing time—from approximately five minutes to just two minutes per invoice. What seems like a modest improvement becomes substantial at scale. For a company handling tens of thousands of invoices monthly, this time reduction translates into measurable financial and operational gains.
But raw speed is only part of the benefit. What matters more is touchless processing—the ability for invoices to be fully ingested, validated, coded, and submitted for approval without human intervention. For companies who activate supplier-level and rule-based automation, Ascend delivers touchless rates above 60%, with some exceeding 80%.
These capabilities offer not only faster throughput but also higher accuracy, reduced rework, and stronger audit compliance. The AP team can focus on exceptions and high-value tasks, not clerical bottlenecks.
Month-end is a deadline, but it’s also a reporting milestone. Finance leaders need immediate access to data that is both complete and accurate. Ascend’s deep integration with Workday surfaces real-time reporting on cash positions, invoice status, exception queues, and supplier commitments.
This visibility extends beyond AP. Treasury teams, controllers, and CFOs benefit from transparency across the invoice to pay process, enabling informed decision-making with minimal guesswork. There are no last-minute reconciliations, missing invoices, or unexplained discrepancies that push reporting into the late hours.
What distinguishes Ascend in a crowded AP automation market is not just its technology, but its readiness for complex, high-volume environments. Ascend customers often arrive after outgrowing simpler systems like Workday OCR, which lack the scalability, configurability, and precision that sophisticated enterprises demand.
With Ascend, automation is not just a bolt-on feature; it is the operating model. The platform’s built-in intelligence adapts to evolving invoice formats, supplier behavior, and organizational workflows—without requiring constant reconfiguration.
As finance departments take on more strategic responsibility, AP teams must evolve. Automation is no longer about eliminating busywork. It is about building a finance function that is resilient, scalable, and positioned for insight rather than firefighting.
By investing in smart AP automation today, organizations are not just accelerating month-end—they’re elevating the entire financial operation.