Accounts Payable Coordinator Job Description

What Does an Accounts Payable Coordinator Do?

Suppliers want to be paid on the promised date, and budget holders want nothing paid without their sign-off. Accounts payable coordinators keep both sides happy in the finance offices of large companies, government agencies and universities, matching invoices to purchase orders, chasing missing approvals and scheduling the weekly payment runs.

Also known as: Accounts Payable Operations Coordinator

Accounts Payable Coordinator Duties and Responsibilities

The primary responsibilities of an accounts payable coordinator include:

• Match invoices to purchase orders and receiving records before releasing them for payment.
• Schedule weekly check, ACH and wire payment runs and confirm each batch with the bank.
• Set up and update vendor records after verifying W-9 forms and bank details by phone.
• Route invoices that lack approval to the right budget holder and chase a reply.
• Resolve vendor questions about late, short or duplicate payments within an agreed turnaround.
• Run duplicate-payment and aged-invoice reports and clear the exceptions they turn up.
• Prepare year-end 1099 forms and check vendor tax details for gaps.
• Monitor the shared AP inbox and invoice-scanning queue so nothing sits unprocessed.
• Reconcile vendor statements to the payables ledger and request credits for overpayments.
• Train department staff on invoice submission, approval steps and payment cutoff dates.

Required Skills and Qualifications

To succeed as an accounts payable coordinator, you will need the following skills and qualifications:

• Three-way matching of purchase orders, receipts and invoices
• AP modules in SAP, Oracle, NetSuite or QuickBooks
• Excel for aging reports and vendor reconciliations
• 1099 and W-9 reporting rules
• An eye for fraud, such as fake bank-change requests
• Prioritizing when payment runs and month-end collide
• Firm, courteous manner with suppliers on the phone
• Accuracy across large volumes of invoices

Education and Training

To land a coordinator job, you should have hands-on payables experience with a high invoice volume and a flair for spotting duplicates. Many come from AP clerk or accounting assistant jobs. BLS lists some college but no degree as the usual starting point for the wider clerk group, with several months of training on the job. The next step up is usually AP supervisor or payables manager.

Salary and Job Outlook

BLS projects employment of bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks, the group that includes payables staff, to decline about 6 percent from 2025 to 2035. Keying invoices is often less of the job than sorting out the ones that fail to match, because scanning software now handles the clean ones. Openings should still run at roughly 144,100 a year, BLS estimates.

Outlook source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Projections, 2025 to 2035, Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks.