How to choose an AI-assisted accounts payable, spend, and close stack: category map, pricing decoder, scorecard, six-document torture test, fraud controls, and a six-week migration plan.
Almost every finance-automation purchase a small business makes is aimed at one of four specific breakdowns: a coding backlog, an approval chase, payment risk, or a close that lands on day 20 and is not trusted until day 25. Naming yours first is the difference between buying the right category and buying the vendor with the best sales team. This workbook starts with a baseline you fill in — bills per month, approval hours, days to close, late fees, single-payment vendors — and only then puts you in front of a demo. The category map is the core of it. Spend-and-card platforms, AP-first networks, mid-market AP suites, AI-native ledgers, the agents already inside your existing ledger, and outsourced bookkeeping are six different businesses with six different economics, and the published September 2026 pricing for each is laid out so you can see the step change: a domestic business processing 100-1,000 invoices a month can stay under a few thousand dollars a year on the SMB tier, while mid-market suites land in the tens of thousands once implementation is counted. There is a pricing decoder covering seats, platform fees, and per-transaction charges, a full TCO worksheet, and a plain explanation of why a free spend platform is not free — it is funded by interchange and float, which shapes the vendor's incentives in ways worth understanding before you move your banking. The evaluation tooling is designed to be used on the call. A 20-question demo script, and a six-document torture test where you make the vendor process your own bad scan, multi-line invoice, credit memo, duplicate, and foreign-currency bill live rather than accepting results emailed afterward. Then the parts most buyers skip: a controls chapter built around the fact that roughly three in four organizations faced business email compromise attempts last year, including a vendor bank-change callback protocol you can print and post; a set of questions to send your bookkeeper or CPA before you shortlist; a six-week migration plan with vendor master cleanup and a parallel-run week; eight metrics with a monthly review; and five situations where the honest answer is that software is not your problem.
Every one of these is free and email-gated, same as this one.
Decode per-resolution pricing, audit your knowledge base, and run a real 200-question bake-off before you sign an AI customer support contract.
PDFA vendor-selection workbook for AI phone agents: pricing decoder, 40-point scorecard, demo-call script, 14 adversarial test calls, contract checklist, and a 30-day pilot plan.
PDFCapture every lead, answer every call, and keep past clients buying and referring on autopilot — without hiring a full-time ISA.
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