Connect the Dots Between AP and Your S/4HANA Migration

S/4HANA migrations are major undertakings—but if AP is left behind, the risk of failure rises fast. This article explores why optimizing accounts payable early is key to a smoother transition and long-term ERP success.

Business leaders call SAP S/4HANA migrations transformational. They're not wrong, but they might be missing something.

These multi-year, multi-million ERP investments are headline news, dominating the technology agenda and taking up huge amounts of time, effort, and resources. The plot twist is that 70% of ERP projects fall short of their business objectives.

One common reason ERP projects fail is that accounts payable (AP) gets left behind. When AP isn’t included in the migration plan and stays stuck in outdated systems, it creates integration issues, delays, and extra costs down the line.

That’s why leading organizations are embracing Invoice Lifecycle Management (ILM)—a smarter, more strategic approach to AP. ILM goes beyond baseline AP automation by embedding intelligence, compliance, and control at every step—from receipt to reconciliation.

Wherever you are on your S/4HANA migration, you need to assess, comply, integrate, and map your AP. These four foundational pillars for AP automation will also support your ERP migration by reducing complexity, cost, and SAP customizations.

1. ASSESS: Where is your AP now?

Assess your current AP capabilities with one eye on the future. Identify the automation gaps and barriers holding invoice operations back, such as a patchwork of manual accounting processes, legacy systems, solution sprawl, and workarounds that add technical debt.

Imerys saw a need to modernize AP before a rollout of Shared Services. Just like them, you need to evaluate how your current AP solution handles different invoice types—and whether it can scale across multiple ERP environments—including, but not limited to, your future S/4HANA system.

Consolidate your invoicing tools now in a unified AP layer. Heidelberg Materials opted for this best-of-breed approach, selecting Basware for its flexibility, user experience, and proven AP automation across manufacturing and supply chains. The takeaway? Don’t wait for S/4HANA to understand where your AP is now.

2. COMPLY: How is compliance evolving?

E-invoicing will soon be the default for tax compliance and business transactions worldwide. While each country has its own regulations, the trend is towards mandatory, real-time, structured e-invoices, often with direct reporting to tax authorities.

ILM helps organizations stay ahead of evolving mandates by embedding compliance directly into invoice workflows—ensuring readiness for country-specific regulations like ViDA. This will mandate cross-border e-invoicing across the EU in 2030. So, you’re ready without disrupting your ERP timeline and interrupting IT teams immersed in the technical aspects of S/4HANA.

Basware has worked with many companies to stay ahead of changing rules—helping Heineken beat the 2026 compliance deadline in France.

3. INTEGRATE: Is your integration plan robust?

While CIOs prioritize ease of integration, finance leaders cannot afford to stand still on AP automation. IT wants clean core SAP and finance wants agility. ILM delivers both by using pre-built SAP-certified connectors to streamline integration, reduce custom code, and preserve data continuity.

This calls for balancing integration costs versus the limitations of some ERP-based tools. While SAP is a leading ERP provider with built-for-purpose AP applications, specialized AP is proven to help you achieve ROI faster. As Heidelberg's team discovered, relying solely on SAP tools means more custom code, more IT effort, and a slower global rollout. ILM bridges those gaps.

Focusing on integration helps you determine if your AP is S/4HANA-ready...and whether it’s future-ready. For example, how will you migrate invoice data? And could this be automated? Basware uses pre-built SAP integrations and SAP-certified connectors to smooth out integration bumps, preserve data continuity, and cut manual data handling—with Basware AI trained on a dataset of 2.3 billion invoices.

4. MAP YOUR AP: What’s your AP roadmap?

Set clear objectives for AP transformation that align with your overall ERP and IT goals. ILM provides a strategic roadmap that connects AP automation to broader business outcomes including productivity, efficiency, cybersecurity, and data governance. This enables phased rollouts, stakeholder alignment, and measurable ROI across finance, IT, and procurement.

KION mapped out the journey early. “We chose Basware because it let us separate invoice automation from SAP,” said Thomas E. Müller, GPO Finance Supply Chain. “That decision helped us stay clean and scalable.”

The future shape of AP

AP automation should be the vanguard for the future of finance, not a byproduct of a big IT project. It’s the first move towards a smarter, leaner finance function ready to scale and support business needs globally.

As your S/4HANA journey unfolds, ILM gives complete control of invoicing while making your ERP transformation more resilient by cutting risk, cost, complexity, and customizations by up to 10x. The sooner you think about AP automation the better.

Get the checklist and avoid the costly mistake most ERP projects make—neglecting AP. Learn how to reduce risk, cut customizations, and set your migration up for success.