The global transition to SAP S/4HANA is proving far harder than expected. Research from ISG reveals that nearly 60% of SAP migrations are delayed and exceed budget, driven by underestimated complexity, scope expansion, and internal capacity constraints. Yet one function — Accounts Payable — is consistently left out of migration planning, and it is causing serious downstream damage.

Kira Mondrus, CMO of Basware, has made this the centrepiece of her message since joining the company. When AP stays stuck in outdated systems during an ERP transition, the result is integration issues, compliance failures, approval delays, and spiralling costs. Her argument is straightforward: treat AP as a strategic component of the migration, not an afterthought.

At the heart of the problem is a persistent tension between two sets of priorities. CIOs want a clean, uncluttered SAP core with minimal custom code. CFOs demand agility in AP automation and global compliance coverage. These two goals have historically pulled in opposite directions — and that gap is exactly where Basware positions itself.

Basware's listing on the SAP® Store — the official marketplace for SAP and partner offerings — marks a significant milestone. More than 650 SAP customers, including global enterprises such as Heineken, Danone, Engie, and Cummins, are already running Basware's AI-powered platform. The SAP Store listing makes it faster and easier for new enterprises to deploy the solution and accelerate the full value of SAP Cloud ERP.

Critically, Basware has earned SAP Clean Core Certification — one of the first AP providers to do so. Built on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), it connects through a certified native BTP connector with no custom middleware required. This means organisations can implement full AP automation while keeping their ERP core entirely clean — delivering a reported 10X reduction in AP-related ERP customisation.

Jon Stevens, SVP of Global Business Development at Basware, describes the platform as the AP Value Accelerator that makes the SAP Cloud ERP investment pay off — delivering intelligent automation and compliance that results in faster time to value, a cleaner core, and enterprise-wide AP excellence.

SAP's native ERP workflows are designed to handle structured data efficiently. The challenge arises with the unstructured reality of global invoicing — non-PO invoices, complex supplier formats, multi-currency documents — where manual intervention slows processes and inflates costs. This is where Basware's proprietary InvoiceAI technology delivers its sharpest edge.

SmartPDF replaces legacy OCR by using contextual AI to interpret invoices accurately, eliminating character-recognition errors. In practice, one Basware customer reduced invoice processing time from 48 hours to just 2 hours. Meanwhile, SmartCoding addresses the persistent problem of non-PO invoices: rather than having finance staff manually guess the correct ledger code, the tool analyses years of historical data to instantly suggest accurate coding — reducing approval cycles and protecting data integrity within SAP.

Real-world results reinforce this. At manufacturing company Mauser, integrating Basware with their existing ERP delivered plug-and-play connectivity that cut approval time for non-PO invoices from 3.6 days down to just 1.6 days — while the core SAP S/4HANA migration continued uninterrupted.

The broader strategic case Basware makes goes beyond the 2027 migration deadline. Mondrus advocates for a finance architecture built around a clean SAP core surrounded by an ecosystem of modular, interoperable specialist tools — a design philosophy she describes as future-proofing operations. All-in-one ERP systems cannot keep pace with the evolving complexity of global invoicing; specialist platforms that plug into the ERP without burdening it are the path forward.

This is particularly relevant for global compliance. Basware supports more than 60 e-invoicing mandates across 190+ countries, reducing what many finance teams refer to as a "compliance tax" — the ongoing cost of manual intervention and country-specific regulatory changes. For multinational organisations mid-migration, this coverage means compliance does not become a blocker to going live on schedule.

The KION Group case illustrates how this plays out at scale. By deploying Basware before their S/4HANA rollout, KION established a unified global AP template across Germany, France, and other key markets — meaning future regional rollouts required no redesign. As Thomas E. Müller, Senior Director of GPO Finance Supply Chain at KION, explained, the clean core principle was central, and Basware's external architecture made it possible to modernise AP without building complexity into SAP.

Key Takeaways

• →Nearly 60% of SAP S/4HANA migrations are delayed and over budget — with overlooked Accounts Payable complexity identified as a major contributing factor.
• →Basware is now listed on the SAP® Store with SAP Clean Core Certification, connecting through a native BTP connector with no custom middleware and enabling a 10X reduction in AP-related ERP customisation.
• →Decoupling AP from the ERP migration allows finance teams to modernise invoice automation and global compliance independently — accelerating ROI before go-live.
• →Basware's InvoiceAI — including SmartPDF and SmartCoding — tackles unstructured invoice data that SAP's native ERP cannot handle efficiently, with one customer cutting processing time from 48 hours to 2 hours.
• →Coverage across 60+ e-invoicing mandates in 190+ countries eliminates the compliance burden for multinational SAP users, protecting them from regulatory disruption during and after migration.
• →Basware's Spotlight Plus SAP Partner status and dedicated practices at Accenture and Deloitte position it as a strategic complement — not a replacement — to SAP, bridging the gap between CIO clean-core goals and CFO automation demands.