The DPO Blind Spot 

A payment made exactly on schedule can still be the wrong outcome for the business. Pay a day early on thousands of invoices and you’ve handed working capital back to suppliers for nothing. Pay a day late on the wrong ones and you’ve lost a discount, triggered a penalty, or put a supplier relationship on notice. Both look identical on a DPO trend line.

That’s what makes Accounts Payable a harder problem than it looks. Accounts Receivable has one direction to fix, get paid faster. Accounts Payable has two, and moving the wrong way on either one costs the business money. 

Why DPO doesn’t tell you where the problem is 

Days Payable Outstanding measures how long the business takes to pay its suppliers. Extend it and you free up cash. Extend it too far, or inconsistently, and you start eating discounts, triggering penalties, and straining the terms suppliers were willing to offer in the first place. DPO is the one working capital metric where “more” isn’t automatically the answer, and that’s exactly why a single number is such a poor guide to managing it.

An identical DPO can be hiding completely different realities underneath: 

• Manual invoice entry creating delays that have nothing to do with payment strategy 
• Invoices blocked on failed three-way matches, sitting idle while a discount window closes 
• Payment terms on the invoice that don’t match what was actually negotiated 
• Slow approvals pushing a payment past the point where it was ever a deliberate decision 

Each of these needs a different fix, and most AP operations are set up to see none of them: manual entry and blocked invoices sit under touchless processing, term discrepancies sit under payment-term mismatch, and the timing decision itself sits under deliberate DPO management, not default drift. 

This isn’t a discipline problem. According to Hackett Group’s 2025 Working Capital research, the gap between top-quartile and median performers in DPO runs to a 9% performance delta, and it’s widening, even as overall payables performance improves. Top performers aren’t paying later by accident. They’re managing timing as a deliberate lever. Median performers are mostly just waiting to see what the process does. 

That’s not a cash discipline problem. It’s a visibility problem.

A shared standard for what “on time” actually means

Before payment timing can be managed deliberately, the business needs one definition of what the AP process is supposed to do: invoice receipt and capture, matching and validation, posting, approval, payment, clearing, the same standard flow, applied the same way, everywhere.

Without that standard, “on time” means something different in every region and every approver’s inbox. One team pays against the invoice date, another against the goods-receipt date. One approver treats a price variance as a blocker, another waves it through. Early payments happen because nobody flagged that the terms allowed for float. Late payments happen because an exception sat in someone’s queue for a week with no owner.

This is where ARIS Process Core applies to Accounts Payable, the same governed standard already establishing how Order Management and Accounts Receivable should run. 

Where the diagnostic work pays off 

The fix isn’t paying every invoice as late as possible, and it isn’t rushing every invoice through, either. It’s knowing which invoices are sitting in exceptions that are costing money right now, a discount window closing, a penalty clause approaching, and which are simply working through the process as designed.

This is where ARIS Process Mining does its work: reconstructing how invoices actually move from receipt to clearing, transaction by transaction, across ERP, procurement, and payment systems, rather than relying on a DPO average that blends everything together. That surfaces the patterns a single number hides, a specific supplier consistently triggering manual matches, a particular exception type quietly costing the same discount every quarter, one region running an approval cycle twice as long as the rest of the business for no defined reason. 

None of that shows up in a DPO trend line. All of it is actionable once it’s visible, because it turns payment timing from something that happens to the business into something the business decides. 

The standard and the reality, together 

A governed standard defines what disciplined payment timing should look like. Visibility into execution shows where actual behavior departs from it. Neither one alone gets you there: a standard with no visibility is just policy nobody can verify, and visibility with no standard just shows you variation with nothing to measure it against.

Put them together, Process Core setting the standard, Process Mining showing the reality, and you get what ARIS calls a Digital Twin. A powerful Digital Twin doesn’t just tell you your DPO number, it tells you whether that number is the result of a decision or an accident, and that’s what turns payables from a cash-timing afterthought into a genuine lever of working capital.

That distinction matters beyond this quarter’s numbers, too. As AP starts to introduce automation into matching, approvals, and payment scheduling, every one of those tools needs a governed process to act on. Automate a process where “on time” means five different things in five different regions, and you’ve just made the inconsistency faster, not smarter.

Closing the gap

Order Management and Accounts Receivable carry the revenue side of this story, cash coming in. Accounts Payable starts the cost side, cash going out, and the timing of that outflow is just as much a working capital lever as anything on the receivables side, just one that’s rarely managed with the same rigor. 

The 9-point performance gap between median and top-performing payables organizations isn’t a resourcing gap. It’s the difference between a business that manages when it pays, and one that just finds out afterward. 

Source: Hackett Group, 2025 Working Capital Survey: Payables Rebound, but Receivables and Inventory Lag (U.S. survey, 1,000 largest publicly traded nonfinancial companies). The Hackett Group® 2025 Working Capital Survey: Payables Rebound, but Receivables and Inventory Lag