A while back I worked with a health system that had three people on their AP team with one main goal: keep the AP inbox under 5,000 emails.
It started after they went through an acquisition. They picked up a lot of new vendors, and with them came a lot more email. Nobody really sat down and decided that three people should be managing an inbox count. It just kind of happened over time as the team tried to keep up, and eventually that number became the job.
About a year later, they were still working toward it. The biggest issue was that by the time they got to an email, the vendor had usually already sent two more about the same invoice. So the more they fell behind, the more emails came in, and it was really hard to ever get ahead of it.
I think about that team a lot. They were working hard every day, and they were good at what they did. The problem was that they were doing a job nobody had ever actually defined.
What actually shows up in the AP inbox#
If you've spent any time in healthcare AP, you probably already know what fills that inbox. Vendors want to know if you got their invoice, and then they want to know when it's going to be paid. Monthly statements come in and need to be matched against what's in the ERP. There are remit-to changes, bank change requests, W-9s and certificates of insurance to track down, and plenty of follow-ups on things that were already asked about. On top of that, a lot of vendors just pick up the phone and call.
Very little of this is actually processing invoices. It's all the communication around invoice processing, and it comes in every day whether or not anyone planned for it.
If you look at most AP job descriptions, you'll see invoice entry, coding, and payment runs. You won't usually see answering vendor emails or reconciling statements, even though from my experience that can take up a big part of the day.
Why nobody sees it#
Most AP staffing plans are built around invoice volume. They look at how many invoices come in, how many one person can process, and how many people that takes. Vendor emails and calls aren't part of that math, so they never really get accounted for.
The ERP doesn't capture it either. It tracks invoices, approvals, and payments, but it has no way of knowing that someone spent their morning looking up payment status for a dozen vendors and writing back to each of them.
And since the cost is already sitting inside salaries, the work kind of looks free. Nobody gets a bill for it. I think that's how a team ends up with a goal like keeping the inbox under 5,000. When there isn't a clear definition of the work, the inbox count ends up being the only thing anyone can measure.
What it actually costs#
A typical vendor inquiry takes about five to ten minutes by the time you read the email, find the invoice in the ERP, check the status, and write a reply. If someone is handling 30 to 50 of those a day, that's anywhere from two and a half to eight hours of their day. Statements take even longer, and reconciling one can easily take an hour or two.
The time is really just the start. When responses slow down, vendors start escalating, and month-end gets harder every time. Eventually credit holds start showing up, and in healthcare that can become a much bigger problem than an uncomfortable phone call. I've seen this kind of work get to the point where a health system's imaging equipment was nearly shut off.
It also wears on people. It's tough to show up every day to a goal you know you can't hit, and teams in that situation tend to burn out. When someone does leave, their part of the inbox doesn't go with them. It just gets passed to whoever is still there.
Why the usual fixes don't solve it#
The most common answer is to hire another person, and that does help for a while. The problem is that the follow-up cycle is still there. As long as responses are slow, vendors keep sending more emails, and the pile keeps growing. That team of three could have become a team of four and still been chasing the same number.
The other common answer is a vendor portal, where vendors can look up their own invoice and payment status. It makes a lot of sense on paper, but from my experience most vendors keep emailing and calling anyway, because that's how they've always done it.
Neither of these really gets at the actual problem, which is that the work itself was never defined in the first place.
Giving the work a name#
Once this work has a name, a lot changes. You can count it, you can plan staffing around it on purpose, and you can decide what good looks like, whether that's same-day responses or getting statements reconciled before close starts. That's a much better target than the size of the inbox.
I've started calling this AP inbox work. It's everything your team does to handle what vendors send and ask about, separate from processing the invoices themselves. It's a real job, and most AP departments are doing it right now. It just doesn't have a job title, a line in the staffing plan, or a clear way to measure how much of it there is.
A good place to start#
If this sounds like your team, I'd recommend tracking how much time everyone spends on vendor emails and phone calls for a week. It doesn't have to be anything fancy.
How to track it for a week
Have each person keep a quick tally of every vendor email and phone call that isn't a new invoice, along with a rough idea of how long each one took. A shared spreadsheet works, and so does a sheet of paper at each desk. At the end of the week, add it all up.
From what I've seen, the number usually surprises people, and it gives you something most AP departments have never had: an actual picture of how much time goes into the job nobody hired for.
