SAP ECC end-of-life is no longer a distant concern. Only about one in six SAP customers have completed the move to S/4HANA or SAP Cloud ERP. Nearly half haven’t started. And for most of them, accounts payable is still being treated as something to sort out after the migration, rather than before it.
That is the wrong order.
We recently hosted a session with Chris Foti, Ben Dunkle, and Craig Stasila from SAP, bringing 28 years of SAP ecosystem experience into the room. Three things came out of it worth knowing before your programme goes any further.
Addressing AP early makes the migration easier, not harder
Companies that externalise AP complexity before migrating arrive at their new ERP with fewer customisations to rebuild. One customer reduced their required AP customisations by 90%. That means less regression testing, a cleaner core, and a lower risk profile for the programme overall. Heineken, Danone, and Corning all addressed AP as part of their transformation, not after it.
Clean core is a technical commitment, not a marketing term
Of more than 900 solutions certified by SAP, only 12 hold the specific clean core certification Basware carries. What that means in practice: Basware connects to SAP through the BTP connector without placing any custom code inside the ERP. When SAP releases a new version, Basware owns the regression testing and connector maintenance, not you. That is what the certification commits them to.
Compliance is more than e-invoicing mandates
Basware covers 60-plus mandates across 190-plus countries, with a dedicated team tracking regulatory change. But fiscal compliance is only part of it. In an environment where AI is increasingly involved in processing decisions, you need to be able to answer: who approved this, who changed it, and if an agent made a decision, why? An unbroken audit trail from receipt to payment is now a governance requirement, not just a regulatory one.
One more thing Craig said that is worth taking away: stop chasing AI for its own sake. Both SAP and Basware have AI built into the platforms you are already paying for. An SAP migration is the right moment to adopt it, because you are already redesigning how invoices are handled.
Watch the full session, including a live product walkthrough showing data flowing between SAP and Basware in real time.
Watch the recording
