The most common delays come from poor data quality in vendor master and purchase order records, insufficient stakeholder buy-in, capture training on too narrow a sample of real invoices, and integration complexity across SAP MM, FI, and archiving. Cross-departmental participation matters more than teams expect: exception ownership decisions need Purchasing, Receiving, Tax, and IT in the room, and projects stall when AP is left to make those calls alone.
Storing invoice documents in the SAP database rather than a proper archive degrades performance. The email channel for inbound invoices depends on server configuration outside SAP, so it should be set up early rather than discovered as a dependency during testing. The Chart of Authority needs an automated maintenance approach, or it becomes a manual burden that persists long after go-live. System refreshes deserve their own checklist, because a routine client copy can silently break the RFC connections between SAP and capture, the ArchiveLink mappings, and the background jobs; each refresh should end with an end-to-end invoice test before intake reopens. The most preventable delay, though, is excessive customization. PetSmart's original environment carried 235 custom objects that increased support costs and blocked upgrades; our reimplementation replaced most of them with standard VIM capability and brought the count to 27. The fastest path forward is usually reducing complexity rather than adding features.