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In short: An emailed invoice with “approved, please pay” typed above it feels like documentation, but it isn’t a control — nobody’s actually matching it against a purchase order or confirming it hasn’t already been paid. Duplicate and erroneous payments typically run 1–2.5% of total disbursements, and nearly 30% of nonprofit fraud traces back to one person handling multiple financial tasks without oversight, which is exactly how small, lean finance teams are usually structured. Automating the purchase-to-pay process closes that gap without adding steps for anyone.

Somewhere in your inbox right now, there’s probably an invoice. Maybe it came from a vendor directly, maybe a program manager forwarded it with “approved, please pay” typed above the original message, maybe it’s sitting in a shared folder next to a dozen others waiting for someone to get to them. There’s no purchase order attached. No record of what was budgeted for this. If someone asked you to prove this expense was approved by the right person, at the right amount, against the right grant, you’d be digging through email threads to reconstruct it. 

It’s a small, ordinary moment, and it happens at many nonprofits without anyone thinking about it. Nobody questioned the amount, because nobody had a quote to compare it against. Nobody checked whether it had already come in once before, because nobody was looking. It just moved through the pipe the way invoices always do, and the organization went on with its day. 

Gary Servius has watched this exact moment play out at nonprofit after nonprofit. He’s an account executive at Sparkrock who’s spent more than 15 years working with health and human services organizations, and in a recent webinar, he described what’s actually happening underneath that small, ordinary forward.

This post draws on insights from that on-demand webinar: A Live Look at a Modern Finance System Built for Health Nonprofits. 

What the “just email it to finance” habit actually replaces

Gary’s point wasn’t that email is inherently dangerous, or that the people forwarding invoices are doing anything wrong. It’s that an email thread is standing in for an entire structure of checks that most organizations think they have, but don’t. Without an automated process, he explained, purchase requests typically get submitted through email or paper, which leads to approval delays and miscommunication. And without something matching purchase orders to invoices, making sure expenses get split correctly between restricted and unrestricted funds turns into a slow, manual task — one that raises the odds of errors, duplicate payments, and invoices that simply slip through. 

That last phrase is the one worth sitting with. Slip through. Not caught, not flagged, not noticed. An email thread feels like documentation. It has a timestamp, a name attached, and a sense of having been reviewed. But, it isn’t actually checking anything. Nobody’s matching that invoice against what was ordered. Nobody’s confirming it hasn’t already been paid. The “approved, please pay” at the top of the thread is doing the emotional work of a control without doing any of the actual work of one. 

What an unchecked invoice process actually costs

If you asked most executive directors how often their organization pays the same invoice twice, they’d probably say rarely, or never that they know of. That’s usually true right up until someone checks. The American Productivity and Quality Center has found that between 1% and 2.5% of total disbursements processed by organizations each year are duplicated or erroneous — on a $5 million operating budget, that’s somewhere between $50,000 and $125,000 a year, quietly gone, for nothing. A separate study from SAP Concur found that 1.29% of invoices businesses process are duplicates, worth an average of about $2,034 each. 

Here’s what makes this worth talking about rather than just worrying about: it’s a solved problem, just not one an inbox can solve. Organizations using AP automation catch and prevent about 95% of duplicate payments before they’re ever processed. The gap between those two numbers isn’t bad luck, and it isn’t a careless finance team. It’s the difference between a process that checks and a process that just moves things along. 

How an unchecked AP process makes fraud possible

Kinley Graham, Sparkrock’s Director of Pre-Sales, spent years as a Director of Finance and CIO at a disability care nonprofit before he ever sold finance software to anyone. He’s lived the staffing reality most small nonprofits share: one or two people touching the entire purchase-to-pay cycle, because that’s simply the size of the team. It’s not a flaw in how the organization is run. It’s just what a lean nonprofit finance team looks like. 

It’s also, according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the exact condition under which fraud happens most often. Nearly 30% of nonprofit fraud cases trace back to one person handling multiple financial tasks without any real oversight. That’s not a comment on the honesty of nonprofit staff. It’s a comment on what a process without separation actually requires to fail: not a dishonest person, just one mistake, or one bad actor, going unchecked long enough. 

The financial exposure is real but proportionate. Nonprofits suffer roughly half the median loss per fraud scheme compared to for-profit businesses and government entities — about $76,000 versus $150,000. That’s genuinely better news than it might sound. But $76,000 lands differently in an organization running lean on grant funding than it does at a company with deep reserves, and the mechanism behind both the small case and the large one is identical. A former finance executive at a nonprofit fundraising arm of a major health system misappropriated roughly $7 million over a decade through fraudulent invoices and vendor kickbacks, a scheme that went undetected for years because authority was concentrated in one role with no real separation of finance functions. Nobody’s suggesting your organization is a $7 million fraud waiting to happen. The point is narrower, and more useful: an unchecked invoice-to-payment process is the mechanism either way. The only real difference is how many zeroes show up at the end. 

The cost of manual accounts payable: finance too busy to do finance

Every invoice that arrives without a standard intake point has to be chased down, matched by hand, coded manually, and tracked through an approval that lives nowhere but a scattered email thread. Multiply that across every vendor, every program, every grant your organization manages, and you’ve got a finance team spending real hours each week reconstructing information that should already exist in a structured form. 

That’s time your controller or finance director isn’t spending on the work you actually hired them to do. Cash flow planning. Forecasting against grant budgets. Helping a program lead understand what they can actually afford before they commit to it, instead of after. Building the kind of financial picture your board wants to see, rather than the one that gets hastily assembled the week before a meeting. A finance lead freed from chasing receipts and playing detective on whether something’s already been paid isn’t just less exposed to risk. They’re available for the work that actually moves the organization forward — and that’s a harder thing to put a number on, but it’s no less real for being hard to measure. 

There’s a credibility cost too, specific to organizations that answer to funders. When a program officer asks for documentation on a grant-funded purchase, an email thread isn’t a satisfying answer, even when nothing was actually done wrong. It just looks like an organization that can’t account for its own money quickly. 

What replaces manual invoice approval, without adding more steps

None of this is an argument for more red tape. Gary’s point, and the through-line of the entire webinar, was the opposite: the goal is to move the checking that currently happens inconsistently, or not at all, into something that just happens automatically, every time, without anyone having to remember to do it. A purchase request gets created with the right account coding and budget category already attached. It gets checked against available budget before it’s even submitted. It routes to whichever approver the dollar amount or the grant actually requires. The purchase order, the receipt, and the final invoice stay linked the entire way through, so nobody is manually re-matching three documents that should have been connected from the start. 

It also does something small teams can’t do through headcount alone. The system enforces who can request, who can approve, and who can pay, even when the same handful of people are wearing all three hats. That’s not a replacement for good hiring or good judgment. It’s a backstop for the moments when judgment alone isn’t enough — which, eventually, it never is, for anyone. 

The forward is still going to happen. The question is what catches it. 

Someone is always going to forward an invoice with “approved, please pay” typed above it. That’s not the part worth fixing. What’s worth fixing is everything that isn’t happening underneath that forward — the matching, the budget check, the audit trail, the separation between the person who asked for something and the person who paid for it. An inbox can hold a conversation. It can’t hold a control. 

Watch the on-demand webinar — A Live Look at a Modern Finance System Built for Health Nonprofits — or book a demo with Sparkrock to see what a connected purchase-to-pay process looks like for your organization. 

Frequently asked questions

Why is emailing invoices to finance risky for a nonprofit? An emailed “approved, please pay” note feels like documentation, but it doesn’t actually check anything. Nobody’s confirming the invoice matches a purchase order or that it hasn’t already been paid, so errors and duplicate payments can slip through without anyone noticing.

How much do duplicate or erroneous invoice payments actually cost? Industry research puts duplicate or erroneous disbursements at roughly 1–2.5% of an organization’s total payments each year. On a $5 million operating budget, that’s between $50,000 and $125,000 quietly lost annually — a gap that AP automation can close by catching around 95% of duplicates before they’re processed.

Why are small nonprofit finance teams more vulnerable to fraud? Because one or two people often handle the entire purchase-to-pay cycle out of necessity, not poor management. Nearly 30% of nonprofit fraud cases trace back to one person handling multiple financial tasks without real oversight — the exact structure a lean finance team tends to have by default.

What does an automated purchase-to-pay process check that email doesn’t? It checks the request against available budget before submission, routes it to the correct approver based on dollar amount or grant, and keeps the purchase order, receipt, and invoice linked throughout — and it enforces separation between who can request, approve, and pay, even when the same few people fill all three roles.