A payment run is a scheduled batch process in which an accounts payable team selects every supplier invoice due within a defined window, validates the selection, and releases it to the bank as a single consolidated payment file.
A payment run has three stages that are often collapsed into one. The proposal lists the invoices eligible for the chosen due date range. The review is where an approver inspects that proposal, removes disputed items, and confirms bank details. The execution generates the payment file, usually an ISO 20022 pain.001 message, and transmits it to the bank.
An invoice misses a payment run for four recurring reasons:
- it arrived after the selection cut-off date
- it carries a supplier payment block that nobody released
- its three-way match tolerance was exceeded on price or quantity
- the supplier bank record is incomplete or was changed without verification
The payment run is the last point at which an error is still cheap to fix. Once the file leaves for the bank, correcting an overpayment means requesting a supplier credit note and chasing the cash back, which takes weeks rather than minutes.
Cadence is a policy decision with a measurable cost. A weekly run keeps discount windows reachable and spreads cash outflow across the month. A twice-monthly run halves the processing effort but pushes a share of invoices past their due date, because an invoice approved on day 16 waits for the following cycle.
Phacet applies pre-payment controls as invoices arrive, so the payment run proposal contains only invoices already matched against their purchase order and screened for duplicates. Exceptions surface before the cut-off instead of during the review.
