Middle Market, Meet the AP System You Deserve

In a regional distribution firm outside Chicago, the CFO is reviewing invoices late on a Thursday. The ERP interface is clunky. There’s a $48,700 vendor payment sitting in limbo. The controller isn’t sure if it was approved.

The AP team sent two follow-ups to the bank portal already. No one’s sure who’s responsible, and there’s no clean audit trail.

This scene isn’t rare. It’s the norm in the global middle market.

These are companies with $50M to $1B in annual revenue—manufacturers, logistics providers, wholesalers, regional SaaS leaders. They’re operationally sophisticated but structurally underserved.

With over 200,000 firms globally, they anchor supply chains and employ tens of millions. And yet, when it comes to payments infrastructure, they’ve been largely ignored.

No wonder CFOs describe their payment systems as duct-taped. UX is fragmented. Workflows are brittle. And trust—in vendors, tools, and internal processes—is eroding by the quarter.

Too Big for SMB Tools. Too Lean for Enterprise Suites.

Small businesses plug into Stripe, QuickBooks, and Square. Enterprises have the budget and IT force to mold Oracle or SAP to their will. Not saying that these are prefect tools, but they are viable options for these two markets.

This doesn't translate to the middle market.

They’re large enough to need real controls and governance. But too lean to justify multimillion-dollar implementations. So they inherit ERPs never designed for agility and stitch together email approvals, PDF POs, and shared folders.

Every process requires toggling between four to ten interfaces. Every audit becomes a search-and-rescue mission.

📌 Design Principle: Build for End-to-End Flow
A great user experience for this market must prioritize continuity: one interface that spans procurement, approvals, payments, and reconciliation.

When every touchpoint carries the same logic, labeling, and data structure, errors drop—and so does the anxiety of second-guessing the system.

Why Workarounds Are Signals, Not Failures

When a team member keeps a personal spreadsheet of approvals, that’s not laziness—it’s survival. They don’t trust the system to surface the right information when they need it. So they replicate it elsewhere.

A Ghanaian export firm's AP team we worked with used WhatsApp to confirm payment statuses because the ERP didn’t send any automatic vendor alerts.

In Mexico, a mid-sized retail group required every payment to be triple-checked manually in a shared Excel log before release—simply because past system sync issues cost them vendor trust.

📌 Design Principle: Design for Redundancy Reduction
The most trusted systems eliminate the need for side-processes.

They notify the right stakeholders automatically, display real-time status changes, and embed contextual info (like GL codes or approval notes) directly into the interface—so no one has to track it down.

The Emotional Cost of Broken UX

Most AP systems don’t feel broken until they break down. A single missed wire isn’t a tech issue—it becomes a performance issue. A person issue.

We’ve seen it repeatedly: a $130M medical supplier in Florida with a sudden $90K duplicate payment due to interface lag. No fraud, just a poorly timed double-click.

The AP manager cried in the follow-up review. “I thought it didn’t go through,” she said. And the CFO had no interface-level insight to see what really happened.

📌 Design Principle: Surface Feedback in Real-Time
A great user experience must offer immediate clarity—on success, on failure, on pending status. Micro-interactions matter: visible confirmations, intuitive color systems, logical layout of approval chains.

Without these, human confidence becomes the system’s weakest link.

Transformation Isn’t About Features. It’s About Confidence.

CFOs don’t hesitate to approve a $500,000 capex investment. But ask them to switch an AP system and suddenly the fear sets in.

Not because the upgrade isn’t needed—but because their lived experience tells them it’s risky.

Past transitions have been IT-heavy, multi-quarter endeavors that still left gaps in visibility and control.

📌 Design Principle: Make UX Transitions Painless
Use progressive rollout models. Offer pre-migration sandboxes. Let teams experience the new system while the old one still runs.

And above all: preserve their sense of control. UX that respects continuity builds adoption faster than any training manual.

When the System Works, People Stop Looking Over Their Shoulders

We helped a logistics company in Nairobi simplify its AP workflow. Previously, approvals happened via Google Docs, and wires were sent through bank portals by a single treasury clerk.

After moving to a modern platform with clear, role-based workflows and integrated bank APIs, average approval times dropped by 64%. But the most notable shift? Support tickets dropped to near-zero. No one needed to ask, “Where’s this payment?”

📌 Design Principle: Make Trust the Default
Embed audit trails. Show who did what, when. Confirm outcomes visibly.

Give each actor—AP clerk, approver, controller, vendor—the exact interface they need, nothing more. UX is trust infrastructure.

UX is the Difference Between "Did it Work?" and "Of Course it Worked."

You don’t have to teach someone how to trust Google Maps. Or Apple Pay. The experience teaches them.

That’s the bar for B2B AP.

If your users need training to navigate core tasks—or worse, if they build side processes to verify outcomes—the system is working against your team.

📌 Design Principle: Let UX Teach Without Words
Design elements should signal logic. Button placement reflects priority. Error messages suggest action. Status pages show future states.

The Middle Market Is Ready. The Tools Must Catch Up.

According to industry research, fragmented systems are a major roadblock for mid-sized companies when it comes to AP efficiency:

A study by PYMNTS and American Express found that 93% of mid-sized firms plan to further automate their AP/AR processes, with over 60% citing system fragmentation and workflow inefficiencies as core reasons for doing so.

And in global markets like India, Brazil, and South Africa, the need is even more urgent—multi-currency workflows, fragile local banking rails, and legacy ERP integrations pile on friction.

But the solution isn’t building more layers.

It’s building systems with fewer failure points—designed from the inside out, with users at the center.

Start With Better Questions

At WDIR, we don’t start with a feature wish list. We start with questions:

• What’s the cost of your most misunderstood process?
• Where do your teams hold their breath hoping the system works?
• Who checks five places just to confirm one thing?
• When do users say, “I just want to know where this stands”?
• And what does trust look like—for every role in your workflow?

If your systems can’t answer those, neither can your team.

We design payment architecture that scales with your operations and respects your people. If that’s what you’re looking for, let’s talk.