New data: what 2.5 billion invoices reveal about finance performance in 2026
The 2026 Basware Finance Performance Report is the first attempt to put a number on how well the invoice lifecycle actually runs, at scale. It's built on production data from over 6,500 enterprises, 250 million invoices a year, and more than US$10 trillion in cumulative spend – not a survey, and not self-reported. Ten benchmarks across four categories (Operating Autonomy, Cash and Working Capital, Control and Risk, Compliance) show where most finance functions sit today, what the best 5% are doing differently, and what the gap between them is actually costing.
Worth reading alongside Basware's Invoice Lifecycle Management platform, which maps to the same four categories these benchmarks measure.
What you'll get from the report:
- The best-in-class vs. network-average gap on each of the ten benchmarks, and what's driving it.
- How-to-improve guidance finance and AP teams can put to work straightaway.
- Real customer results – including Restalliance's 50% cut in manual AP processing time, and Heineken France's move from 75% to 95% on-time payment compliance.
For CFOs, this is a way to benchmark their own function against the market. For AP leaders, it's a shortlist of where automation pays off first.
