How Many Invoices Are Sent Per Business 2026: 560 Billion a Year [Data]

Key Takeaways

Businesses sent roughly 560 billion invoices worldwide in 2024, and only about 22% were structured electronic documents (Billentis).
68% of businesses still key invoices in by hand rather than through an automated workflow (PYMNTS Intelligence, September 2025 Accounts Payable Tracker).
A typical small or mid-size business processes around 450 invoices in a busy month, based on SAP Concur’s SMB customer data.
Best-in-Class accounts payable teams process an invoice in about 1.7 days, versus 8.2 days for everyone else (Ardent Partners, State of ePayables 2025).
11.5 million US independent workers now invoice businesses directly, up 55% since 2020 (MBO Partners).
The global billing and invoicing software market is forecast to nearly double, from $12.06 billion in 2025 to $23.69 billion by 2035 (Market Research Future).

Businesses sent roughly 560 billion invoices worldwide in 2024, and only about 22% of them were structured electronic documents, according to Billentis, the e-invoicing research firm that has tracked the market since 1999. This piece pulls together what real, dated research actually shows about invoice volume, from the global total down to what a typical small business sends and processes in a month.

How many invoices are sent worldwide each year?

Roughly 560 billion, and the number keeps climbing, according to Billentis’s 2024 global e-invoicing and tax compliance report, “Watch the Tornado!” Of that total, about 125 billion, close to 22%, were structured electronic invoices exchanged through a system like Peppol or a country’s own mandated e-invoicing network. The remaining 78% moved as paper or as an unstructured PDF that still has to be manually read and re-typed on the receiving end.

Figure 1: Roughly 4 in 5 of the world’s invoices still move as paper or an unstructured PDF rather than a structured electronic document. Source: Billentis, 2024 Global E-Invoicing and Tax Compliance Report.

How many invoices does a typical business send or process in a month?

Around 450 in a busy month, based on the closest real benchmark available. SAP Concur’s invoice-processing data, drawn from a year of its SMB customer base, businesses with up to 1,000 employees, put a typical business at roughly 450 invoices moving through its books in a busy month. That figure describes invoices a business processes on the accounts-payable side, the bills it receives from vendors and suppliers, rather than invoices it issues to its own customers. No single industry report publishes an equivalent census for the sending side, since that number depends heavily on business model: a contractor billing five clients a month looks nothing like a subscription business auto-invoicing thousands of recurring accounts. What connects the two sides is that every invoice one business receives is an invoice another business sent, so the volume flowing through accounts-payable departments is a real, if partial, proxy for how much invoicing activity is actually happening across the wider economy.

For businesses that specifically bill on a repeating schedule rather than one-off, How Many Businesses Use Invoicing Software covers how many of them have already moved that volume onto a dedicated platform instead of a manual spreadsheet or template.

Why are most invoices still not sent or processed electronically?

Old habits, mostly. PYMNTS Intelligence’s Accounts Payable Tracker, fielded in September 2025, found that 68% of businesses still key invoices in by hand rather than routing them through an automated or structured electronic workflow. PYMNTS Intelligence’s own 2026 B2B payments coverage, citing the same Billentis data referenced above, describes “fewer than a quarter” of all invoices as electronic worldwide, a separate confirmation of the same format gap from a different angle. That is a striking number given how long invoicing software has been mainstream, and it lines up with the global data above: if more than three-quarters of invoices arrive as paper or an unstructured PDF, there is no clean digital record for software to read automatically, so a person has to type the numbers in instead. Manual entry is also where a meaningful share of billing errors and duplicate payments originate, a cost this site has covered in more depth in Late Payment Statistics 2026, which looks at what happens once a slow or error-prone invoicing process starts affecting when a business actually gets paid.

Figure 2: More than two-thirds of businesses still enter invoice data manually rather than through an automated workflow. Source: PYMNTS Intelligence, Accounts Payable Tracker (September 2025).

What does the gap between manual and automated invoicing actually cost?

A lot of time, and a measurable amount of money. Ardent Partners’ State of ePayables 2025 research found that Best-in-Class accounts payable teams process an invoice in about 1.7 days on average, 79% faster than everyone else, who average 8.2 days per invoice. The same research puts the average invoice exception rate, meaning an invoice that gets flagged, questioned, or kicked back before it can be paid, at 18.4% industry-wide, versus roughly 47% lower for Best-in-Class teams. Cost follows the same pattern: the average business pays $9.84 to process a single invoice, while Best-in-Class teams do it for close to 79% less.

None of that gap comes from Best-in-Class teams handling smaller invoice volume; it comes from more of their supplier invoices arriving in a structured format that software can match automatically instead of a human retyping every line. Ardent Partners puts a number on that enablement gap directly: across the market, only 57% of a typical company’s suppliers are set up to send invoices electronically at all, while Best-in-Class teams have roughly 1.4 times that share of their supplier base enabled for electronic submission. In other words, a meaningful part of why the average business still processes invoices slowly is structural rather than a choice made at the point of processing. It reflects how many of that business’s own suppliers can send a structured invoice in the first place, which is a supply-side constraint no amount of internal automation alone can fully solve.

Figure 3: The gap between top-performing and average accounts payable teams shows up directly in how long an invoice takes to process. Source: Ardent Partners, State of ePayables 2025.

Who is actually sending most of the world’s invoices?

Small businesses and independent workers, mostly, simply because they vastly outnumber large enterprises. In the US, 11.5 million independent workers now invoice businesses directly, consultants, contractors, and freelancers billing companies rather than platforms or consumers, up 55% since 2020, according to MBO Partners’s 2025 State of Independence in America report. That growth means a rising share of the world’s invoice volume originates from a single person billing a handful of clients rather than a large company’s accounts-receivable department.

Australia offers one of the clearer national pictures of the same pattern. 97.3% of all Australian businesses are classified as small, per the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and that population of mostly one- and few-person operations is still generating serious transaction volume: net GST cash collections reached $90.2 billion in the 2024-25 financial year, according to the Australian Taxation Office’s GST Administration Annual Performance Report, a figure that exists only because of the tax invoices underlying it. No global source publishes an equivalent business-size breakdown of who sends invoices worldwide, so Australia’s numbers are used here as an illustrative, sourced example of the same pattern MBO Partners documents for the US, small operators generating outsized transaction volume relative to their size, rather than a global claim. The cash-flow strain that volume creates once payments run late is covered in more depth in Small Business Cash Flow Statistics 2026.

Figure 4: The number of US independent workers invoicing businesses directly has grown by more than half since 2020. Source: MBO Partners, 2025 State of Independence in America Report.

How much money actually moves through invoices?

A lot more than the raw invoice count alone suggests. In the US, roughly $7 trillion in addressable sales moves annually through invoiced transactions across six major industries, construction, manufacturing, transportation, professional services, administrative and support services, and wholesale trade, according to Bain & Company data cited in PYMNTS Intelligence’s 2026 B2B payments coverage. That figure helps explain why the format gap covered earlier matters commercially and not just operationally: a business still processing a meaningful share of that flow by hand, on paper or an unstructured PDF, is managing real money through a workflow built for a much smaller economy than the one actually running through it today. Every one of the 560 billion invoices counted at the start of this piece represents a slice of a specific commercial transaction somewhere in that flow, and the six industries Bain identifies are exactly the kind of high-invoice-volume sectors where a single missed or mishandled document can hold up a meaningfully large payment.

Figure 5: The addressable invoiced-sales flow in the US alone is measured in trillions, not billions, across just six industries. Source: Bain & Company, cited by PYMNTS Intelligence (2026).

How fast is the software layer built to handle all this volume growing?

Quickly, and the growth is a direct response to the gap documented above. The global billing and invoicing software market was worth an estimated $11.28 billion in 2024, rose to $12.06 billion in 2025, and is forecast to reach $23.69 billion by 2035, a 6.98% compound annual growth rate, according to Market Research Future. That growth rate outpaces general enterprise software spending, which tracks with the size of the problem it is solving: a global invoice volume still 78% outside a structured digital format, per the Billentis data above, represents an enormous addressable market for any tool that can move that volume onto structured rails. Billentis’s own research adds a supply-side data point to the same trend: more than 1,000 dedicated e-invoicing service providers now operate in Europe alone, a market it describes as one of the most dynamic segments in enterprise software. None of that growth is guaranteed to reach every business at the same pace. A subscription-billing company auto-invoicing thousands of recurring accounts has very different software needs from a sole trader billing five clients a month, and the market’s growth curve reflects demand pooling disproportionately around the businesses generating the highest invoice volume first.

Figure 6: The software market built to handle rising invoice volume is forecast to nearly double over the next decade. Source: Market Research Future.

Invoice Volume at a Glance

Metric	Figure	Scope	Source
Total invoices sent (2024)	~560 billion	Worldwide	Billentis
Structured electronic share	~22% (~125 billion)	Worldwide	Billentis
Still keyed in by hand	68%	Businesses, US-weighted	PYMNTS Intelligence (Sep 2025)
Typical SMB volume, busy month	~450 invoices	Businesses up to 1,000 employees	SAP Concur
Invoice processing time, average	8.2 days	Businesses surveyed	Ardent Partners (2025)
Independent workers invoicing businesses	11.5 million	United States	MBO Partners (2025)

Table 1: The 560-billion-invoice global total sits alongside the format, speed, and volume data that explain who is generating it and how it actually moves.

The Bottom Line

There is no single, clean answer to exactly how many invoices a given business sends, because that number depends on business model, client count, and industry in a way no census tracks directly. What the real 2025 and 2026 data does show clearly is the shape of the problem underneath that question: roughly 560 billion invoices move through the global economy each year, nearly 4 in 5 of them still outside a structured digital format, and 68% of businesses are still typing that volume in by hand. The businesses generating the most of it are not large enterprises but small businesses and independent workers, a population that grew 55% in the US alone since 2020. A BillyPaid invoice is built as a structured, payable document from the moment it is created, so the invoices a business sends do not add to the manual-entry pile on the receiving end, and its own volume stays trackable rather than buried in a spreadsheet or a folder of PDFs.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many invoices are sent worldwide each year? Businesses sent roughly 560 billion invoices worldwide in 2024, according to Billentis’s global e-invoicing and tax compliance report. About 125 billion of those, or roughly 22%, were structured electronic invoices; the rest moved as paper or as a PDF attached to an email, which functions like paper for processing purposes.

How many invoices does a typical small business send or process in a month? SAP Concur’s invoice-processing data, drawn from its SMB customer base (businesses with up to 1,000 employees) over a 12-month study period, found a typical business processes around 450 invoices in a busy month. That figure describes invoice volume moving through a business’s accounts-payable side; no single industry report publishes an equivalent census for how many invoices a business issues to its own customers, since that number depends heavily on business model and client count.

Why are most invoices still not sent or processed electronically? Manual habit outpaces available technology. PYMNTS Intelligence’s Accounts Payable Tracker, fielded in September 2025, found that more than two-thirds of businesses, 68%, still key invoices in by hand rather than through an automated or structured electronic workflow, even though invoicing software has been mainstream for well over a decade.

Who is actually sending most of the world’s invoices? Small businesses and independent workers, simply because they are the large majority of active billers. In the US, 11.5 million independent workers now invoice businesses directly, up 55% since 2020, according to MBO Partners’s 2025 State of Independence in America report. In Australia, 97.3% of all businesses are classified as small, according to the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.