Accounts payable outsourcing means paying a bookkeeper, BAS agent or specialist provider to run your supplier bills: receiving invoices, keying and coding them, chasing approvals and getting the payment run ready. One Australian provider’s published range (October 2025) puts it at roughly $500 to $1,500 a month at about 100 invoices. What you can’t hand over is the decision to pay. Approvals, releasing the money and checking a supplier’s new bank details stay with you, whoever does the keying.
So the choice isn’t only “outsource or not”. You can keep AP in-house and do it by hand, automate it in-house, outsource it or have a bookkeeper run it inside an automation tool.
What accounts payable outsourcing covers
An outsourced AP service usually covers everything between a bill arriving and a payment file being ready. It stops short of sending the money. An April 2026 article by SEOJOE, published on Accounting Times, lists the day-to-day work as receiving and entering invoices, coding them to your chart of accounts, matching them against purchase orders, managing the approval queue, preparing payment batches and reconciling supplier statements each month.
Who does the work varies. Some businesses add AP to their existing bookkeeper’s monthly package. Others use a dedicated accounts payable services provider, onshore or offshore, who logs into your Xero or MYOB file and works from a shared inbox. Bigger companies often go to business process outsourcing. Business process outsourcing (BPO) is where a specialist firm runs a whole back-office function for you under a service agreement, usually with a team in another country.
Most of the hours in that list go on two jobs: invoice data entry and coding. Software now does that part well. It’s also often the part you’re paying someone to do by hand. Our guide to accounts payable automation in Australia covers where the line sits between work software should take and work that needs a person.
What it costs to outsource accounts payable in Australia
Expect roughly $500 to $1,500 a month at about 100 invoices, which works out to $5 to $15 an invoice at that volume. Those are Scale Suite’s published ranges (October 2025), alongside hourly rates of $40 to $80. Treat them as one provider’s guide rather than a market rate. Your quote will move with volume, how messy your invoices are and whether the provider also prepares the payment run.
Offshore is cheaper per hour. The SEOJOE article estimates AP-level offshore work at $18 to $35 an hour, or $25,000 to $40,000 a year for a dedicated offshore AP specialist, fully loaded. If AP comes bundled with bookkeeping, Perth firm Digit Business lists $600 to $1,200 a month for small businesses doing 50 to 200 transactions, with AP and AR management included. Our breakdown of what a bookkeeper costs in Australia covers the hourly and package models in more detail.
To compare fairly, put a number on what you do now. The ATO’s benchmark, built on Deloitte Access Economics costings, puts processing a PDF invoice at $27.67 and a paper one at $30.87. That cost is shared between the business sending the invoice and the one paying it, and the ATO attributes 60% of it to accounts payable. The figure dates from 2016. It’s the cost per invoice the ATO uses in its Peppol value assessment. The invoice processing cost calculator runs it against your own volume.
A full-time hire is a different scale. The SEOJOE article estimates a local AP hire in Sydney or Melbourne at $65,000 to $85,000 a year once super, leave, recruitment and overheads are added. That’s a loaded estimate. Advertised pay is a separate measure: AP officer ads on SEEK had a midpoint of about $83,000 in mid-2026, according to whatsthesalary.com, and 12% super goes on top of that. Few businesses doing 100 invoices a month need a full-time AP person, though. AP is usually a slice of an office manager’s or bookkeeper’s week, which is why its cost is easy to miss. The real cost of manual AP goes through what the per-invoice benchmark leaves out, like rework and duplicate payments.
What stays with you when you outsource accounts payable
Approval authority, payment release, supplier relationships and the call on any change to a supplier’s bank details stay with you. A provider can prepare all of it. The decisions still belong to the business.
Approvals stay because the provider can’t know whether those 40 extra units on an invoice were ordered. Someone in your business can. A good provider routes each bill to the right person and chases them, but the yes comes from you.
Payment release mostly stays too. The SEOJOE article notes that payment execution “usually stays with your local team as a control measure”. A common set-up has the provider prepare the payment run and you authorise it in online banking. That split is good segregation of duties, because the person keying bills isn’t the person releasing money. Outsourcing can tighten this control in a small business where one person used to do both.
Supplier relationships are yours as well. Disputes, credit terms, price changes and the phone call when a delivery comes up short all need someone who knows the supplier. A provider can flag that an invoice doesn’t match the PO. Sorting it out usually takes you.
Supplier bank detail changes
This is the one to get in writing. Bank account change fraud is when a scammer, often writing from a hacked or lookalike email address, tells you a supplier’s account has changed so the next payment lands with them. Payment redirection scams cost Australians $166.8 million in 2025, up 9.3% on the year before, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre’s Targeting Scams Report.
When the person processing your bills sits in another office or another country, they’ve likely never spoken to that supplier. They can’t pick a fake update by tone. Outsourcing doesn’t create this risk, but it does put the person checking further from the supplier, so the steps have to be written down rather than left to memory. Agree up front who calls the supplier back on a number you already hold, who updates the contact in Xero or MYOB and who signs off before the next payment goes. A clause you can paste into the service agreement: “Changes to supplier bank details are confirmed by phone on a number already on file before the next payment run.” The payment fraud risk check scores the rest of your payment process in two minutes. Our piece on the three moments AP is most exposed to fraud covers the other two.
Outsource vs automate accounts payable: the four set-ups compared
Outsourcing moves the work to someone else. Automation takes most of the keying away and keeps the work with you. Combine them and a bookkeeper reviews bills the software has already read and coded. The table compares all four for a business processing about 100 supplier invoices a month on Xero or MYOB.
| In-house, manual | In-house, automated | Outsourced | Outsourced plus automation | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost at ~100 invoices a month | About $1,660 a month of staff time (the accounts payable share of the ATO benchmark), or about $2,770 counting both sender and payer | About $190 a month: $69 of software plus about $120 of review time. Approval routing is a $40 add-on per entity | About $500 to $1,500 a month on one provider’s published range | $569 to $1,569 a month if the provider charges its full rate, plus $69 of software |
| Control | Full, but it rests on one or two people’s memory | Full, with rules and an audit trail in one place | Shared. The provider runs the process and you keep approvals and payment release | Shared, with every step visible to both sides in the same tool |
| Speed | Depends on who’s in that week. Bills pile up before month-end | Bills arrive coded, so the wait is usually on approvers | Set by the service schedule, often weekly batches with an agreed turnaround | Provider reviews pre-coded bills, so turnaround is shorter |
| Fraud exposure on bank detail changes | Relies on someone spotting a changed BSB by eye | Depends on the tool. Some flag bank details that differ from the supplier’s saved record | The processor may not know the supplier, so call-back steps must be in the agreement | Software flags the change and the provider follows the agreed call-back. You release payment |
Worked example: 100 invoices a month
- In-house, manual: about $1,660 a month (the accounts payable share of the ATO benchmark). The ATO puts a PDF invoice at $27.67 and attributes 60% of that to accounts payable, so 100 invoices come to about $1,660. The full $27.67 times 100 is about $2,770, but that covers both the sender and the payer. It’s a 2016 estimate and it’s staff time already on your payroll, so nobody invoices you for it.
- Outsourced: $500 to $1,500 a month. That’s Scale Suite’s published range at about 100 invoices.
- In-house, automated: about $190 a month. Pulsify’s Get Control plan is $69 a month for 100 documents (AUD, ex-GST). Then add review time. Our assumption: two minutes to check each bill the software has already read and coded, so a bit over three hours a month. At about $36 an hour (the $75,000 midpoint of SEOJOE’s $65,000 to $85,000 loaded-cost estimate over a 2,080-hour working year), that’s about $120. If you want bills routed to different approvers in steps, the Multi-step Approvals add-on is $40 per entity per month on top of the $69 plan, which takes it to about $230.
- Hybrid: the provider’s fee plus $69. At Scale Suite’s range that’s $569 to $1,569 if the provider charges its full rate. Reviewing bills that arrive coded is less work than keying them, so ask what that does to the fee.
The hybrid: a bookkeeper running AP inside an automation tool
In the hybrid, your bookkeeper runs AP inside an automation tool connected to your own Xero or MYOB file. The software reads and codes each bill. The bookkeeper reviews what it flags, the owner or ops manager approves and the business releases payment.
The bookkeeper’s hours go on exceptions and supplier queries rather than typing, so it’s fair to ask what that does to their fee. Every bill, approval and comment sits in one trail you can both see, which deals with the visibility worry most owners have about outsourcing. And if the bookkeeper changes, the coding history stays in the tool instead of leaving with them.
Pulsify is built for both sides of this. In-house teams use it to get supplier bills from the inbox to coded, checked and ready to approve in Xero or MYOB. Bookkeepers and BAS agents use it to run AP for every client from one login, each client with its own inbox, suppliers and approval workflows. Auto-approve rules by supplier and amount come with every plan. Routing each bill by supplier, amount, account or job through several steps needs the Multi-step Approvals add-on ($40 per entity per month). Coding picks accounts and GST codes for each line using how that supplier’s past bills were coded.
Before a bill reaches approval, Pulsify checks it for duplicates, checks the ABN and flags bank details that don’t match the supplier’s contact record in Xero or MYOB. It doesn’t pay the bill. Payment release stays in your banking with whoever holds that authority. As of October 2026, plans for a single business start at $69 a month for 100 documents. Practice plans for bookkeepers start at $59 a month across up to four client files (AUD, ex-GST). The AP automation page walks through the full flow.
How to choose between outsourcing, automating or both
Pick by who you have, how many bills you get and how much risk you can carry.
No finance person and nobody who wants the job? Outsourcing is the straightforward fix. The bookkeeper who already does your BAS is the obvious first call. Set the bank detail rules with them before they start.
Someone in-house already spends a day a week keying bills? Automate first. You get the time back, supplier knowledge stays in the building and you can still bring in a bookkeeper to review later. NACS Constructions automated in-house at 400 to 500 invoices a month and cut month-end from 10 days to 5.
If you already pay a bookkeeper for AP, ask whether they’d run it inside an automation tool and what that does to their fee. That’s the hybrid. It’s often the cheapest way to get the hours back and keep a second set of eyes on every bill.
Very low volume is the exception. Under about 50 bills a month, a tidy manual process in Xero or MYOB with a good bookkeeper checking it can be enough.
To see how the hybrid runs on Xero or MYOB, start a free 30-day trial or book a demo. Bookkeepers can trial it on one client before moving the rest, and our guide on how to get bookkeeping clients covers pricing AP as a service.
Sources: ATO, Peppol eInvoicing value assessment: cost calculations · National Anti-Scam Centre, Targeting Scams Report 2025 · SEOJOE on Accounting Times, Accounts payable outsourcing (April 2026) · Scale Suite, Outsourced accounts payable Australia · Digit Business, Outsourced bookkeeping cost Australia
Further reading: The Real Cost of Manual AP · How Much Does a Bookkeeper Cost in Australia? · AP Automation for Accounting Firms and Bookkeepers in Australia