The general shift towards moving near-cash processes such as AP and AR to shared services centers is based on the fact that these are mature, core business functions. AP and AR are fundamentally transactional based processes, which makes them easy to move to shared services centers. However, the very maturity of these processes can create issues, as they are generally manual, labor-intensive, and paper-based. Many organizations simply chose to move the existing processes to a shared services center to reduce costs, but moving a disjointed, inefficient process to a shared services center can exacerbate existing problems, not solve them.

The tired 'back office' label associated with AP and AR invokes a certain diminished value to these services. As a result there is little interest in investing in these processes. However, benefits achieved by moving to a shared services center depend on the desire to make processes more analytical and knowledge-based rather than purely clerical. Therefore, when moving AP and AR to a shared services center it is important to challenge your organization to think about where they expect to be in 2, 5 or 10 years. Evaluate models that will help the organization achieve those goals.

Currently, there are three models for moving AP and AR processes to a shared services model: Capture Only, Complete Processing, and a Hybrid Model.