Complete guide to the SAP procure-to-pay (P2P) cycle and process

Every month-end, your accounts payable (AP) supervisor manually keys stacks of invoices into SAP — flipping between vendor look-ups, remembering which tax codes apply in each state, and praying they aren’t mistyping that six-digit cost center. Meanwhile, your purchasing team is hunting down stalled purchase orders (POs) in ME23N, and vendors are calling because yesterday’s promised payment run never left F110.

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. SAP’s native P2P tools are powerful, but notoriously click-heavy and fragmented.

This guide pulls apart the procure-to-pay (P2P) cycle in SAP, shows exactly where the frictions arise, and explains how Stampli layers on AI, dynamic workflows, and a native SAP connector to clear the gridlock (without rewriting your ERP). 

It’s what made one Stampli customer write in a review, “The amount of time it takes us from start to finish for payments has gone from about 5 days to 2 days in most cases, some days even same day.”

What is the SAP procure-to-pay process?

SAP’s P2P cycle is the backbone of operational spend control. It links purchasing in Materials Management (MM) with liability and cash postings in Financial Accounting (FI). At a high level, the flow breaks into four universal stages:

1. Request and approve

• What happens: Employees raise Purchase Requisitions (PRs) that route for budget sign-off
• Typical SAP apps: ME51N, Fiori “Create Requisition”
• Primary pain points: Rigid approval paths and duplicate requests

2. Order

• What happens: Buyers convert PRs to Purchase Orders (POs) and dispatch them to suppliers
• Typical SAP apps: ME21N, ME29N
• Primary pain points: Manual PO creation and release code gymnastics

3. Receive

• What happens: Warehouse posts a Goods Receipt (GR). Stock and GR/IR clearing are updated
• Typical SAP apps: MIGO
• Primary pain points: GR blocks, partial receipts, and three-way mismatches

4. Pay

• What happens: AP posts the Invoice Receipt (IR), matches to GR/PO, then executes payment
• Typical SAP apps: MIRO and F110 for POs, or FB60 for non-POs
• Primary pain points: Keying errors, GR/IR imbalances, and late payments

Each transition pushes data in both directions:

MM tells FI when goods arrive, and FI tells MM when liabilities are cleared.

That means any bottleneck ripples across the entire cycle.

The 6 touchpoints of an SAP P2P journey

Below is the narrative flow your finance team lives every day. Despite SAP’s built-in complexity, most users know this by heart — from the T-codes to the FI postings that hit the ledger and the headaches that often follow.

1. Purchase requisition

A cost-center owner drafts a PR in ME51N. Budget checks run, then the request lands in a manager’s inbox for release. No FI document posts, but delays here still snowball downstream.

2. Purchase order

Procurement converts approved PRs in ME21N. Each PO line carries account assignment, tax code, and delivery schedule.

In SAP ECC or S/4HANA, you may need extra Release Codes for every value threshold, adding manual rerouting when scope changes.

3. Goods receipt

When the order arrives, warehouse staff use MIGO to post the GR. SAP debits inventory (or expense) and credits the GR/IR clearing account, creating the first FI entry of the cycle.

4. The FB60 detour for non-PO vendor invoices

Utilities, rent, and ad-hoc services land outside the PO flow. AP has to open up FB60, fill header and line-item fields manually, and balance the document before saving it. This single T-code is often behind the highest training burden and error rates.

5. Invoice verification and three-way match closing

Through MIRO, AP matches supplier invoices to the PO and GR. Matching variances trigger invoice blocks that halt payment until they’re resolved. Internally, SAP debits the GR/IR account (reversing the GR credit) and credits the vendor liability.

6. Automatic payment run

Finally, finance schedules F110 to clear due items. Payments flow via bank files, SAP-approved credit-cards, or manual checks — but each of these requires different configuration objects. If any of the earlier steps stall, payments get delayed too. This can damage you vendor relationships.

5 SAP procure-to-pay pain points that keep finance teams up at night (and how Stampli helps)

To see why a “textbook” SAP P2P cycle so often derails in the real world, let’s walk through five recurrent trouble spots — some or all of which you’ve likely experienced firsthand.

More importantly, we’ll see how Stampli neutralizes each one. Stampli doesn’t ask you to throw out SAP. It slips a modern, AI-powered layer over the top, bridging MM and FI while shielding everyday users from the transactional maze underneath.

1. FB60 and MIRO bottlenecks

SAP’s FB60 and MIRO screens demand line-by-line coding, tax-code look-ups, and multiple validation clicks. SAP Community threads are full of users troubleshooting warning messages and unbalanced documents, showing how easy it is for invoices to stall, causing delays for the entire procurement process.

How Stampli helps: Stampli’s revolutionary Cognitive AI™ powers Billy the Bot, Stampli’s AI co-pilot, which means no more manual invoice entry. Instead, Billy auto-captures, codes, and even suggests approvers so your touch time plummets and invoices flow straight to review.

2. Procurement rigidity

SAP’s own documentation shows that expanding or changing a release strategy isn’t a two-click tweak. It’s a four-screen process that requires creating the new release code, assigning it to a release group, flagging it for workflow, and finally transporting the change through QA and PROD. When a manager is out, POs sit in limbo and buyers create work-arounds outside the system.

How Stampli helps: Stampli’s dynamic workflow engine doesn’t require codes and easily handles split approvals, ad-hoc forwards — even managers on vacation. Approvals keep moving with no more blocked POs.

3. F110 errors

A single missed clearing rule in F110 can bounce an entire payment batch, forcing AP to have to rerun proposals and field vendor calls. Even seasoned SAP users frequently ask how to swap house banks or fix TDS recalculations during clearing. And these are hardly edge cases — an SAP community tutorial on “Top 12 common F110 payment errors” documents everything from “Payment method not defined” to “Block not removed at document level.”

How Stampli helps: Stampli Direct Pay is fully embedded in Stampli’s AP system and offers domestic, international, and card payments, complementing or replacing SAP’s F110 depending on your setup. Then, payment status syncs back to SAP. Vendors get paid faster, you get cash visibility in real time, and everyone wins.

4. Vendor management gaps

SAP’s vendor master screens weren’t built for self-service. Gathering W-9s, ACH info, or insurance documents can easily turn into an email back-and-forth that eats up valuable time and becomes impossible to audit. According to Veridion’s 2025 supplier onboarding study, the manual paperwork, cross-function checks, and data entry can cost up to $35,000 per supplier, versus roughly US $2,400 when the process is automated.

How Stampli helps: Stampli’s Vendor Management portal lets suppliers self-onboard and update their own information, like banking details, easily and securely. That means cleaner master data — and fewer emails.

5. Heavy IT overhead

Even small P2P tweaks can trigger transport requests and Basis team backlogs. For example, competing invoice-add-ons take considerable time to set up on a SAP system, and require months of ABAP configuration.

How Stampli helps: Stampli offers continuous SAP synchronization via a bi-directional, real-time connector with no middleware that lets you deploy in days and iterate without transports. Plus, all capabilities run inside Stampli’s simple UI, so casual approvers never have to log into SAP.

6-step blueprint for a modern, SAP-friendly P2P flow

Instead of pouring more ABAP cement over existing problems, Stampli gives finance leaders the agility they’ve always wanted, while SAP remains the immutable system of record that auditors love. The fastest way to see results is to overlay Stampli on top of your current SAP landscape and let each pain point melt away in sequence. Here’s the playbook our SAP customers follow.

Step 1: Capture every request in one place

Launch Stampli’s pre-built Request Form. Billy automatically transforms the narrative into structured PO data, and no one outside procurement even sees a T-code.

Step 2: Route approvals that adapt in real time

Drag-and-drop conditions — like amount, cost center, and project stage — define who needs to sign off on requests. If the VP of Ops is OOO, AP can re-route approvals with a single click (no change tickets or frozen release strategy required).

One Stampli customer says, “Our Approvers found it simple to use and Reviewing invoices was no longer something they dreaded.”

Step 3: Generate or sync purchase orders seamlessly

If you create POs in SAP, Stampli imports them instantly. Prefer to let buyers build simple POs in Stampli? The connector pushes fully-formed SAP POs back through BAPI _PO_CREATE, preserving document flow and audit links.

Step 4: Let AI take over invoice capture and coding

Forward vendor PDFs to a dedicated inbox, where Billy reads the header, line items, tax amounts, and even freight splits, then proposes coding based on historical patterns. The AP reviews and clicks Post. Stampli uses SAP-standard functions to create PO invoices (MIRO-type) and non-PO invoices (FB60-type), each balanced against the correct objects.

Step 5: Pay vendors faster

From the same screen, choose ACH, check, or Stampli Card. Stampli sends the funds directly from your house bank and posts the clearing document back to SAP FI automatically.

Step 6: Clear GR/IR before month-end

Dashboards spotlight blocked invoices, aging GR/IR balances, and overdue approvers for visibility and monitoring. Finance leaders stop firefighting on day 20 of the close and start making proactive decisions instead, transforming your org from reactive and transaction-bound to a proactive, data-driven P2P powerhouse. All of this is done without a single line of ABAP required for standard functionality (enhancements may still require ABAP if desired).

From SAP complexity to P2P clarity

Despite its complexity, SAP is the gold standard for control, auditability, and global scalability. Still, its strengths can throttle the day-to-day agility finance teams need, thanks to rigid data models, release hierarchies, and meticulous posting logic. Stampli doesn’t replace those controls — it amplifies them, overlaying AI-driven speed and a modern user experience that finally makes “doing the right thing” the easiest option.

Imagine a month-end without the FB60 backlog, payment proposals that sail through on the first pass, and a GR/IR balance that clears itself long before auditors arrive. Now consider that future doesn’t require you to rip-and-replace your SAP infrastructure. It’s just a four-week pilot away, powered by a connector your SAP admin will actually like.

It’s time to find out why one Stampli customer said, “We were up and running within weeks of signing our contract.”

But the fastest way to judge any automation claim is to push a real invoice through it. Schedule a demo to watch Billy the Bot capture, code, route, and pay an invoice — all while SAP quietly records every posting in the background.