Häufig gestellte Fragen
What is the difference between accounts payable and accounts receivable?
Accounts payable manages a company's liabilities towards suppliers and creditors — that is, incoming invoices and the resulting payments the company makes. Accounts receivable, by contrast, keeps track of receivables from customers, recording outgoing invoices and monitoring the incoming payments against them. As subledgers, both form the central personal-account areas of financial accounting and are connected to the general ledger via control accounts. Put simply: accounts payable concerns the money going out, accounts receivable the money coming in.
How high is the level of automation in accounts payable today?
The achievable level of automation depends heavily on document quality and system integration and cannot be quantified across the board. In practice, mid-market users frequently report that with OCR document capture and an automated three-way match, a substantial share of standard invoices can be posted without manual intervention. Structured e-invoices in the XRechnung or ZUGFeRD format increase the touchless-processing rate further, because the data is machine-readable and does not first have to be extracted from an image. Manual clarification remains necessary mainly for discrepancies, partial deliveries or unclear account assignment.
What is three-way matching and what is it needed for?
Three-way matching compares three documents with one another before an invoice is released for payment: the purchase order from procurement, the goods receipt from materials management and the incoming supplier invoice. If item, quantity and price match within defined tolerance limits, the ERP system can release the invoice automatically; if the thresholds are exceeded, a clerk is brought in for clarification. The goal is to pay only for what was actually ordered and delivered, thereby avoiding duplicate payments or inflated amounts. Tolerances can typically be configured as an absolute amount or as a percentage, for example to cover minor price or quantity fluctuations.
Do I have to be able to process electronic incoming invoices since 2025?
Yes — for domestic B2B transactions, companies have been required since 1 January 2025 to be able to receive and process structured electronic invoices, without any prior consent from the recipient being necessary. E-invoices within the meaning of the rules are formats that comply with the European standard EN 16931 — in Germany in particular XRechnung and the hybrid ZUGFeRD format from version 2.0.1 onwards (with the exception of certain profiles such as MINIMUM and BASIC-WL). For sending invoices, staggered transitional rules apply until the end of 2027, but the ability to receive and process them has in principle been required since the beginning of 2025. Accounts payable in the ERP should therefore be able to read in the relevant formats and archive them in an audit-proof manner.
How long do incoming invoices have to be retained?
For accounting documents such as incoming invoices, the retention period was shortened from ten to eight years by the Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act (Viertes Bürokratieentlastungsgesetz); the shorter period applies to documents whose previous retention period had not yet expired on 1 January 2025. Many other accounting-relevant records, such as annual financial statements, inventories and books, remain subject to the ten-year period. The period begins in each case at the end of the calendar year in which the document was created or the last entry relating to it was made. Under the GoBD, electronic invoices must be retained in their original format in an unalterable and machine-analysable form, so that subsequent changes are either impossible or logged without gaps; an ERP system supports this through posting, versioning and archiving mechanisms as well as an end-to-end audit trail. In case of doubt, the specific period and its implementation should be agreed with your tax advisor.
Why is early-payment discount (Skonto) so relevant for accounts payable?
An early-payment discount (Skonto) is a price reduction that suppliers grant when payment is made within a short period — for example two percent for payment within ten days instead of net thirty days. Annualised, this advantage in the example corresponds roughly to an interest rate of around 36 percent (2% divided by the 20-day difference, multiplied by 360), so forgoing the discount effectively amounts to expensive financing. ERP-supported accounts payable automatically detects discount deadlines coming due and proposes in the payment run which open items should be settled to take advantage of the discount. From an accounting perspective, note that the discount deduction reduces the consideration and the input VAT must therefore be corrected accordingly.