Special Report
The State of AP Maturity 2026: Grocery Edition
More than 200 finance leaders shared what grocery finance teams are getting right, the challenges they still face, and why unified AP automation is the future.
What Grocery Finance Teams Are Up Against
93% of grocery organizations still rely on a risky blend of partial automation and manual work.
“Good enough” isn’t good enough anymore. Only 2 percent of grocery organizations have fully automated AP end to end — for everyone else, a fragmented approach to Accounts Payable creates disconnected systems, inconsistent processes, and dangerous data silos.
With 70 percent of grocery organizations processing 5,000 or more invoices a month, manual data entry and disjointed software open the door to serious profit leakage and operational inefficiency.
Why Partial Automation Fails
The Top Frustrations with Current AP Processes
- 48%struggle with manual data entry.
- 39%experience delays because teams do not follow the correct AP processes.
- 38%are overwhelmed by invoices arriving in multiple, fragmented formats.
- 36%lack integration with their organization’s other systems.
Automation Spotlight
Prime Steak Concepts processes 4,000 invoices monthly. After switching to unified AP automation, the team spends less time manually handling invoices and more time on high-level growth initiatives.
Inside the Report
The grocery-specific data finance leaders need to see to protect margins and eliminate manual errors.
43%
Of grocery organizations take 5 or more days just to process a single invoice.
55%
Experienced invoice fraud or overpayment in the last year — well above the 41% all-industry average.
52%
Of organizations spend 11 hours or more each week running reports.
99.5%
Header-level capture accuracy achieved with AI-powered AP automation.