27 AUGUST 2026
Estimated reading time : 8 Minutes
Why US Companies Are Outsourcing AP as the Accountant Shortage Worsens
Invoices keep arriving whether or not the accounts payable team is fully staffed. A two-person AP team becomes a one-person AP team when someone leaves, and the job posting sits unfilled for months. Exceptions that used to clear in a day now take a week. Vendors start calling to ask where their payment is. The controller has to decide: pull someone off month-end close to catch up on invoices, push through a rushed hire who may not work out, or let the backlog grow a little longer.
That scenario is playing out in finance departments across the country, and it is not primarily a technology problem. It is a people problem. A growing number of CFOs and controllers are asking whether AP outsourcing handing routine, high-volume accounts payable work to an experienced outside team is a faster and more reliable way to keep operations running while the internal hiring market for accounting talent stays difficult. This article looks at why that question is coming up so often right now, what outsourcing accounts payable actually involves, and how to evaluate it without treating it as an automatic fix or a pure cost play.
1. The US Accounting Talent Shortage Is Changing How Finance Teams Operate
The accounting profession has talked about a coming talent crunch for years. Recent data suggests it has moved from a warning to a measurable trend, though the picture is more nuanced than a blanket “no one wants to be an accountant” narrative.
The Controllers Council’s 2026 Corporate Finance & Accounting Talent Study found that finance leaders are now reporting real hiring difficulty after a year of relative surplus. Sixty-one percent of respondents said they were experiencing either minor (46%) or significant (15%) shortages of accounting, finance, and CPA talent, versus only 38% reporting no shortage at all producing a 2026 Talent Shortage Index of 77%, compared with a Talent Surplus Index of 108% just one year earlier. That is a roughly 31-point swing in twelve months, and the study also reported a Hiring Index of 134% as recruiting activity rebounded to pre-pandemic levels after a two-year lull. Compensation for finance and accounting roles rose sharply over the same period, which the study’s authors linked directly to the tightening talent pool.
The shortage is not evenly distributed across roles. According to the same research, Controllers and Assistant Controllers remain the hardest positions to fill, cited by 44% of respondents, followed by bookkeepers, staff accountants, and financial reporting professionals at 34%, FP&A professionals at 30%, and tax professionals at 29%. That pattern matters: the roles under the most pressure are the ones requiring institutional knowledge and judgment, not necessarily every transactional accounting seat.
On the supply side, the AICPA’s 2025 Trends report found that graduates earning a bachelor’s or master’s degree in accounting fell to 55,152 in the 2023–24 academic year, a 6.6% decline from the prior year a figure also independently reported by CFO Dive. That is a real contraction, but it is also a slower rate of decline than the 9.6% drop in 2022–23 and the 7.4% drop in 2021–22. Master’s degrees in accounting or taxation fell roughly 15% to 14,335, while bachelor’s degrees fell a more modest 3.3% to 40,817. CPA Exam entrants also dropped, from 42,626 new candidates in 2023 (a pre-exam-change surge year) to 28,082 in 2024, though early 2025 data showed 16,448 new candidates in just the first six months a sign the pipeline may be stabilizing, a trend also explored in the Journal of Accountancy’s coverage of the graduate pipeline. Separately, the Ohio Society of CPAs reported 12% year-over-year growth in accounting enrollment in the 2024–25 school year, per National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data the third consecutive semester of growth.
Put together, these sources tell a more precise story than “there aren’t enough accountants.” The graduate pipeline has been shrinking, but the rate of decline is slowing and enrollment may be turning a corner. Meanwhile, hiring demand and compensation have both jumped sharply in a single year a shift the Controllers Council’s own analysis describes as more than a normal cyclical hiring crunch. The mismatch is less about total headcount and more about timing, cost, and finding the right skills exactly when a team needs them. The real challenge is finding the right accounting talent, at the right time, at the right cost, with the skills increasingly complex finance operations require not an absolute shortage of people who can do accounting work.
2. Why Accounts Payable Is Particularly Vulnerable to Staffing Gaps
Accounts payable is one of the highest-volume, most repetitive functions inside finance, which makes it especially exposed when a team loses even one or two people. AP work includes invoice data entry, invoice validation, PO matching, exception handling, vendor inquiries, payment preparation, duplicate invoice detection, reconciliation, and support for month-end close. Much of it is transactional and time-sensitive rather than judgment-heavy, but it still requires trained people to keep pace with volume.
When AP staffing falls behind invoice volume, the effects tend to show up quickly and in ways that are visible outside the finance department:
- Vendor relationships can strain as payment questions go unanswered longer.
- Payment timeliness slips, increasing the risk of late fees or strained terms.
- Early-payment discounts get missed because invoices aren’t processed fast enough to capture them.
- Cash-flow visibility weakens when the AP ledger isn’t current.
- Employee productivity drops as remaining staff work overtime or triage rather than process.
- Month-end close gets delayed waiting on unresolved AP items.
- Internal controls can quietly erode when overloaded teams skip steps to keep up.
It’s worth being careful here: outsourcing does not automatically fix every one of these issues, and a poorly implemented transition can introduce its own delays. But the underlying vulnerability is real AP is a volume-driven function, and volume-driven functions are the first to break when headcount doesn’t match workload.
3. Why US Companies Are Turning to AP Outsourcing
Access to Accounting Talent Without a Long Hiring Cycle
Recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding a new AP hire in today’s market can take months, and there’s no guarantee the role stays filled once it’s filled. Outsourced accounts payable services give a company access to an already-trained, already-staffed team rather than starting a hiring search from zero every time someone leaves.
Scalability During Growth
Invoice volume rarely grows in a straight line. A company adding new vendors, entering new markets, or completing an acquisition can see AP volume jump well before it can justify or complete new permanent hires. An outsourcing partner can typically flex capacity up or down faster than an internal hiring process allows.
Reduce Pressure on Internal Finance Teams
When routine AP tasks move off an internal team’s plate, that team has more room for financial analysis, cash management, forecasting, internal controls, and other strategic finance work the parts of the job that are hardest to replace and most valuable to the business.
Business Continuity
A finance function built around one or two irreplaceable AP employees is fragile: someone gets sick, takes leave, or resigns, and the whole process stalls. A structured outsourcing arrangement typically spreads the work across a team with documented backup coverage, which reduces single-person dependency.
Process Standardization
Experienced AP outsourcing services providers bring standard operating procedures, quality-control checkpoints, and consistent reporting that many internal teams haven’t had time to formalize, particularly in fast-growing companies.
Technology and Automation
Modern providers typically combine OCR-based invoice capture, workflow automation, ERP integrations, AI-assisted invoice processing, exception routing, and reporting dashboards with trained human oversight giving companies access to tooling they might not have built or bought on their own.
4. What Accounts Payable Tasks Can Companies Outsource?
Not every AP task is outsourced the same way, and not every task should carry the same level of automation or oversight. The table below breaks down what is typically in scope.
AP Activity | Can It Be Outsourced? | Typical Level of Automation | Human Oversight |
Invoice data capture | Yes | High | Low |
Invoice validation | Yes | High | Moderate |
PO matching | Yes | High | Moderate |
Non-PO invoices | Yes | Medium | High |
Exception management | Yes | Medium | High |
Vendor communication | Yes | Medium | Moderate |
Payment preparation | Yes | Medium | High |
Payment authorization | Controlled | Low | High |
AP reconciliation | Yes | Medium/High | Moderate |
Reporting | Yes | High | Moderate |
Outsourcing does not mean handing over unrestricted financial authority. Payment authorization, in particular, is typically kept under tight internal control outsourcing partners prepare payment runs and route them for approval, but the actual release of funds usually still requires internal sign-off. Segregation of duties (separating who processes an invoice from who approves it and who releases payment) and defined approval thresholds remain standard practice whether AP is handled internally, externally, or through a hybrid model.
5. AP Outsourcing vs. Hiring Internally
Factor | Internal AP Hiring | AP Outsourcing |
Hiring timeline | Weeks to months per hire, longer in a tight market | Faster access to an already-staffed team |
Access to talent | Limited to local or remote labor market | Broader talent pool through the provider |
Scalability | Requires new hiring cycles for each volume jump | Can typically flex capacity within an existing relationship |
Training | Company builds and maintains training internally | Provider generally owns training and cross-coverage |
Technology investment | Company funds and maintains its own tools | Often bundled into the provider’s platform |
Business continuity | Vulnerable to single-person dependency | Typically built around team coverage |
Management overhead | Direct day-to-day supervision | Managed through SLAs and periodic oversight |
Process expertise | Depends on internal experience level | Often deeper, cross-client process experience |
Control environment | Fully owned and defined internally | Shared model; internal team retains approval authority |
Neither option is categorically better. Internal hiring may still make more sense for companies with small, stable invoice volumes, highly specialized vendor relationships that require deep institutional knowledge, or a strong existing AP team with no capacity or continuity problem to solve. Outsourcing tends to make more sense when hiring has become slow or unreliable, invoice volume is growing faster than headcount, or leadership wants predictable capacity without continually expanding a fixed cost base.
6. AP Outsourcing Is More Than a Cost-Cutting Strategy
It’s tempting to assume companies outsource accounts payable purely to cut labor costs. That is part of the calculation, but in a market where the constraint is often talent availability rather than budget, cost savings are frequently secondary to capacity and reliability. A company that cannot hire a qualified AP analyst at any reasonable salary has a different problem than a company simply looking to spend less.
The broader business case for accounts payable outsourcing typically includes access to specialized talent without a lengthy search, faster capacity expansion during growth or acquisitions, more consistent processes across entities or business units, reduced dependency on a tight hiring market, technology that a company might not build in-house, stronger continuity when people leave, better operational visibility through standardized reporting, and more time for internal teams to focus on higher-value analysis rather than data entry.
A simple way to frame the decision: Talent + Process + Technology + Controls + Scalability. A strong outsourcing partner should be able to speak to how it delivers on all five, not just the first one.
7. The Role of AI in Modern AP Outsourcing
AI has become a standard part of how leading providers run outsourced AP, not a replacement for the underlying service. In practice, this typically means intelligent invoice extraction, duplicate detection, invoice classification, early identification of exceptions, assistance with vendor queries, anomaly detection across payment patterns, automated workflow routing, and analytics that support (rather than make) payment decisions.
It is worth drawing a clear line between AI-assisted AP, where software handles repetitive, high-confidence tasks and flags anything unusual for a trained person to review, and fully autonomous AP, where a system would process and release payments with no human check. Most credible providers today operate in the first category. Financial judgment, fraud investigation, unusual exceptions, and final payment approval still benefit from and in many control environments legally require human oversight. AI in this context is best understood as a way to make an outsourced AP team faster and more consistent, not as a separate solution that replaces the outsourcing relationship itself.
8. When Does AP Outsourcing Make Sense?
Outsourcing tends to be worth evaluating seriously when several of the following are true:
- AP positions remain open for extended periods despite active recruiting.
- Invoice volumes are rising faster than the team can absorb.
- Internal staff are consistently overloaded or working significant overtime on AP.
- AP processes are still heavily manual, with limited automation.
- Vendor inquiries are consuming a disproportionate share of finance-team time.
- Month-end AP work is creating recurring bottlenecks in the close.
- The business is growing through acquisition and inheriting new AP processes.
- Leadership wants to scale operations without continuously adding headcount.
- The organization lacks dedicated AP technology (OCR, workflow tools, matching engines).
- AP is important operationally but isn’t a strategic differentiator worth building deep in-house expertise around.
Outsourcing is less likely to be the right answer when AP volumes are low and stable, the current team is well-staffed and not under strain, vendor relationships require highly specialized in-house knowledge that would be difficult to transfer, or the organization isn’t ready to invest time in a proper transition and governance model. Outsourcing without that groundwork tends to create new problems rather than solving existing ones.
9. How to Choose an AP Outsourcing Partner
Finance Expertise
Does the provider understand accounts payable in the context of broader finance and accounting operations, not just data entry?
US Business Understanding
Can the team work effectively with US-based finance staff, US vendors, and US business norms, including time-zone overlap and communication expectations?
Technology
What ERP integrations, OCR, AI-assisted matching, workflow automation, and reporting dashboards does the provider actually run and how well do they fit your existing systems?
Security
How is financial and vendor data protected, and what certifications (such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, or GDPR alignment where relevant) back that up?
Controls
How are approval workflows, segregation of duties, and audit trails maintained across the outsourced process?
Scalability
Can the provider support a meaningful increase in invoice volume without a drop in accuracy or turnaround time?
Reporting
Can management track invoice cycle time, exception rates, aging, productivity, SLA performance, and payment status in a way that’s usable, not just a data dump?
Transition
What does implementation and knowledge transfer actually look like, and how long does it realistically take to go live?
Service-Level Agreements
What specific KPIs and SLAs are contractually defined, and what happens when they’re missed?
10. Risks of Outsourcing Accounts Payable
A balanced view of AP outsourcing has to include its risks. Common concerns include data security, over-dependency on a single vendor, reduced day-to-day visibility into process details, communication friction (especially across time zones or systems), transition risk during onboarding, poorly defined SLAs that leave performance expectations vague, inconsistent quality if oversight lapses, integration challenges with legacy ERPs, compliance gaps if controls aren’t clearly assigned, hidden costs buried in a contract, and weak governance if no one internally owns the relationship.
Most of these risks are manageable with the right groundwork: clear SLAs with defined KPIs, a documented transition plan, retained internal ownership of approvals and controls, regular performance reviews, and a contract that spells out data-handling and security obligations in specific terms rather than general assurances. Companies that treat outsourcing as a partnership requiring ongoing management not a “set it and forget it” handoff tend to avoid most of these pitfalls.
11. AP Outsourcing + Human Expertise + Automation
The operating model gaining traction among US finance leaders isn’t purely manual and isn’t purely automated it’s a hybrid: internal finance leadership sets strategy and retains control, outsourced AP specialists handle high-volume transactional work, automation and AI speed up repetitive tasks and flag exceptions, and strong controls hold the whole system together.
This hybrid approach tends to be more practical than either extreme. A fully manual internal AP function struggles to keep pace with volume when hiring is difficult, as the current talent market illustrates. A fully autonomous AI-driven AP function, on the other hand, removes the judgment and accountability that finance controls are built around. The combination people, process, technology, and oversight working together is generally what allows a company to scale AP capacity without losing control of it.
12. The Future of AP Outsourcing in the US
Several trends look likely to shape how AP outsourcing evolves through 2026 and beyond, based on current market signals rather than firm predictions. Automation and AI-assisted processing will likely continue expanding across invoice capture, matching, and exception routing. Finance and accounting outsourcing may increasingly move toward more specialized offerings rather than generic back-office support, as providers differentiate around specific processes like P2P, R2R, or FP&A. Demand for accounting talent is likely to remain elevated given the current shortage index and hiring rebound, which will keep pressure on companies to find alternative sourcing models. Providers and clients alike may put greater emphasis on controls and security as outsourcing scales and regulatory scrutiny of financial data handling increases. Outcome-based outsourcing arrangements, tied to specific KPIs like cycle time or exception rates rather than headcount, could become more common. And technology-enabled F&A partnerships where automation and human expertise are explicitly bundled rather than sold separately appear to be the direction most providers are heading. For finance leaders, this means the choice is increasingly not “outsource or don’t,” but “what combination of internal team, outsourced specialists, and automation fits our specific AP volume and risk profile.”
Where This Leaves Finance Leaders
The data doesn’t support a story where every US company is struggling equally to staff its accounting function some organizations are managing fine, and the accounting graduate pipeline shows early signs of stabilizing. But for a large share of finance leaders, hiring has genuinely gotten harder over the past year, and AP is one of the first places that pressure shows up because of its transaction volume. Outsourcing is not a universal fix, and it isn’t only about cutting cost. It’s a structural option worth evaluating alongside internal hiring, particularly for companies where invoice volume, growth, or staffing gaps have made AP a recurring bottleneck rather than a background function.
If hiring constraints are putting pressure on your AP operations, AP outsourcing can provide another path to scale. You can explore Procure-to-Pay outsourcing and broader Finance & Accounting outsourcing services from Viaante to see how a combination of experienced professionals, process expertise, and technology can support your finance team without adding hiring risk. You can also review Viaante’s approach to technology-enabled finance operations or browse the F&A resource center for related insights, or reach out directly via the contact page to discuss your AP volume and staffing gaps.
