The business case
Touchless processing benchmarks for D365 Finance teams
What separates best-in-class touchless invoice processing from the industry average — and how D365 Finance teams can close the gap.
What “touchless” actually measures
Touchless (or straight-through) processing is the share of invoices that go from receipt to payment with zero human keystrokes. It’s the single clearest signal of how much of your AP volume is genuinely automated versus automation-assisted.
The benchmark gap, and what drives it
Per Ardent Partners’ benchmarking, best-in-class organizations hit 49.2% touchless against a 32.6% industry average — and process invoices in 3.1 days versus 10.9 industry-wide. That gap almost never comes down to better OCR; it comes down to how well the exception cases (the ones rules-based automation can’t resolve) get handled.
Where Dynamics 365 Finance teams typically lose touchless rate
Common leaks: PO mismatches that need human judgment, vendor-specific formatting quirks, and multi-entity coding rules that a generic rule engine wasn’t built to handle.
Common questions
- What touchless rate should we be targeting?
- Use the 49.2% best-in-class benchmark as the target, and your current rate as the baseline — the delta is what agentic AI is generally closing.
- Does touchless mean no human ever looks at these invoices?
- It means no human keystrokes are required — a fully matched, high-confidence invoice flows through automatically, with the full audit trail still available.
- How is this measured?
- As the percentage of total invoice volume requiring zero manual intervention from receipt through payment.
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