#accounts-payable
Accounts Payable
Manage vendor payments, track bills, and optimize cash outflow
Backup Withholding Threshold Jumped to $2,000 in 2026: What Small Business Owners Need to Know
The IRS backup withholding threshold increased from $600 to $2,000 effective 2026. Understand what changed, who's affected, how to prevent it, and Form 945 compliance requirements.
Working Capital Management: Master the Cash Conversion Cycle
Small businesses often run out of cash despite healthy profits because working capital is trapped in receivables and inventory. Learn to optimize the cash conversion cycle—the three levers of DSO, DPO, and DIO—to free up thousands without raising debt.
The Cash Conversion Cycle Explained: How Long Your Money Is Actually Tied Up
The cash conversion cycle (CCC = DIO + DSO − DPO) measures how many days cash stays trapped in operations. A worked example shows a wholesale firm with a 66-day cycle tying up roughly $110,000 in working capital, and lays out tactics to shorten collections, inventory, and payables.
How to Stop Deepfake Invoice Fraud: An AP/AR Prevention Guide for Small Businesses
Deepfake fraud cost Arup $25.6 million in one faked video call, and voice cloning now needs just three seconds of audio. This guide shows small businesses how callback verification, two-person approval for banking changes, and periodic vendor-file cleanup stop synthetic vendors, cloned executive voices, and doctored invoices.
New York's Freelance Isn't Free Act: What the $528,817 Splashlight Settlement Means for Businesses That Hire Freelancers
New York's DCWP fined production company Splashlight $528,817 for paying fewer than 1 in 5 freelance contracts on time. Here's what the Freelance Isn't Free Act requires — written contracts for work over $800, payment within 30 days, six years of records — and how similar laws in Illinois and California now apply nationwide.
AI-Generated Fake Invoices Are Fooling Accounts Payable Teams — Here's How to Stop Them
Generative AI made vendor impersonation cheap: 76% of organizations faced payments fraud in 2025, and AI-generated fakes now drive 70.8% of expense-report fraud. Here are the controls that still work — out-of-band verification, dual authorization, vendor-file hygiene, and auditable books.
Freight Broker Bookkeeping: Factoring Fees, Quick Pay, and the $700 Million Double-Brokering Problem
Freight brokers earn the spread between shipper billings and carrier cost — not gross freight value. How to book factoring (a receivable sale at 1–5% recourse, 2.5–5% non-recourse), separate quick pay discounts, track the $75,000 BMC-84/BMC-85 requirement, and use AP discipline to catch double-brokering fraud, now a $500–$700 million annual industry loss.
AI Accounts Payable Automation for Small Businesses: Costs, Savings, and How to Choose
Manual invoice processing costs $13–$30 per invoice, roughly 4 in 10 invoices contain errors, and over half are paid late. This guide breaks down what AI accounts payable automation actually does — capture, coding, approval routing, payment — what it cuts the per-invoice cost to, and the five criteria that separate small-business-friendly AP tools from enterprise overkill.
Supplier Concentration Risk: What Happens When Your One Key Vendor Disappears
Supplier concentration risk — depending on one vendor for over 25–30% of spend or an irreplaceable input — is among the most predictable, least-planned-for small-business threats. A guide to screening your accounts payable for spend and operational concentration, mapping hidden sub-tier dependencies, and building affordable redundancy.
Construction Retainage: How to Book It So Your Cash Flow Stops Lying to You
Retainage withholds 5-10% of every construction progress payment until project completion, and contractors who book it into regular AR/AP instead of separate Retainage Receivable and Retainage Payable accounts lose visibility into which "earned" revenue is actually collectible now versus locked up for months.
Bill.com vs. Melio vs. Ramp: Which AP Tool Fits Your Business?
A side-by-side comparison of Bill.com, Melio, and Ramp for accounts-payable automation — pricing, ERP integrations, AI invoice coding, and which tool fits businesses by invoice volume and approval complexity.
Check Washing Is Back: How to Protect Your Small Business's Accounts Payable From Mail Theft Fraud
Check fraud losses hit roughly $21 billion in 2023 and mail-receptacle theft rose 139% between FY2019 and FY2023. This guide covers the accounts-payable controls that actually stop check washing — positive pay, weekly reconciliation inside the UCC 4-406 window, gel ink, and separating check-writing from reconciliation.