An accounts payable job description is a control document before it is a hiring document. The Office of the Washington State Auditor publishes a table of the roles that the employee who processes vendor payments should not also hold, and it names eight of them. Most of them read like ordinary lines on a job posting, which is how they end up typed onto the same page.
So the question worth asking as you draft is not what an accounts payable person does, but which duties may share one page and which pairs you have handed to a single hire.
An Accounts Payable Job Description Is a Control Design
The duty list you publish is the control design for payables, whether or not you drafted it that way.
The state auditor's Accounts Payable Guide sets out the roles a policy should keep apart: authorization, meaning those who approve purchase orders, invoices or payments, or sign checks; recording, meaning those who process payables and record them in the general ledger; custody of assets, meaning those who perform the check run and mail checks to vendors, or those who receive the goods; and reconciliation, meaning those who reconcile the claims clearing or other bank account. Its instruction on those roles is one sentence: make sure that no one has more than one role in the overall process (Office of the Washington State Auditor, Center for Government Innovation, Accounts Payable Guide, first edition, November 2021).
Segregation of duties, meaning the split that stops one person owning a transaction from start to finish, is already worked through for an outsourced payables boundary in what an accounts payable outsourcing case study has to report, including the federal standard's split of authority, custody and accounting. The list above adds reconciliation to that split as a role in its own right.
What Can Sit on One Accounts Payable Description
Most of the work does, and the description is stronger for saying so plainly.
One person can receive invoices centrally, record the date each one arrived, enter and code it, run it against the order and the receiving record, check whether it has already been entered, chase the discrepancy until it clears, reconcile the vendor statement to your own records, and prepare the payment run for someone else to authorize. The mechanics of that matching and duplicate work sit in invoice processing automation; what matters on the description is that none of it crosses into authorization or custody.
The dividing line is narrow. The auditor's own checklist asks whether accounts payable clerks review invoices for proper authorization before processing payment, and separately whether the employees charged with processing payables are prohibited from approving invoices (Office of the Washington State Auditor, Internal Control Checklist for Accounts Payable, October 2021). Checking that an approval exists is a payables duty. Being the approval is not.
The Duty Pairs That Must Never Share One Description
The state auditor's segregation of duties guide devotes a table to the employee who processes vendor payments, typically as an accounts payable clerk, and lists the eight roles that employee should not have alongside the fraud each pairing enables (Office of the Washington State Auditor, Center for Government Innovation, Segregation of Duties, second edition, March 2026). These are the ones a small firm writes by accident.
Coding the Invoice and Approving It
The table keeps the role that certifies a payment as valid apart from the role that processes it. When the same employee can process payments and certify them as valid, they could conceal unauthorized payments, and the guide advises strongly against putting both roles on one person.
On the page, this pair hides behind polite wording. A description that says the seat enters and codes vendor invoices and also approves invoices under a stated limit has combined them. Approval authority belongs to whoever owns the spend, and it lives on that person's description instead.
Touching the Vendor Master File and Paying the Vendor
The vendor master file holds each supplier's identity and its payment details, so whoever can edit it decides where the money lands, and the table puts creating new vendors or otherwise changing that file at the top of the list. The named risk is fictitious vendor schemes, where a clerk who can also create a vendor sets up a payee using a personal address or bank account and directs payments there. The variation is quieter: payments processed against a legitimate vendor record get redirected to the clerk's own address or bank account.
A line reading maintains vendor records puts this pair on the page. Where vendor onboarding sits in the wider buying cycle is set out in the procure to pay process; on the description, the only decision is that the person who pays a vendor cannot be the person who can change where that vendor gets paid.
Generating or Releasing the Payment
Two more rows cover the money itself. One is generating payments or having access to checks, where the guide names check alteration and electronic payment schemes, including a clerk who can access and edit the file submitted to the bank and change the banking information in it. The other is the ability to authorize payments in any form, including signing checks, approving electronic funds transfers or wire transfers, or serving as a signer on the bank accounts.
A duty phrased as processing the weekly check run, or as holding access to the bank portal, lands in that territory. Preparing the run is recording work. Releasing it is custody, and it stays with a partner or a controller.
Reconciling the Account Those Payments Clear
The table also separates reconciling the bank account or clearing account from processing payments, for the same reason. Whoever could push an unauthorized payment out would also be the person checking the account it went through. The account in question is the bank or clearing account, not the vendor statement work that belongs to the payables seat.
This pairing arrives without anyone deciding it. Bank reconciliation reads like ordinary month-end bookkeeping, so it lands on whichever accounting seat has capacity, and in a small firm that is often the one already keying payables.
Procurement, Journal Entries and Cash Receipting
Three more rows matter for a firm's page. Procurement stays away from payables, because a clerk who can both buy from a vendor and process its invoices may make personal purchases or pay inflated prices in exchange for kickbacks. Journal entries stay away, because an employee who processes payments and posts entries can move funds within the general ledger to conceal a theft or a loss. So does cash receipting, where a clerk handling both can substitute a payment for cash taken out of a deposit.
The Seat Has No Federal Occupation of Its Own
No federal occupational profile carries the title Accounts Payable Clerk, and that changes how you should price the seat.
Look the title up in O*NET, the US Department of Labor's occupational database, and it resolves to Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks, where Accounts Payable Clerk and Accounts Payable Specialist appear as sample reported job titles rather than as occupations of their own (O*NET, Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks, 43-3031.00). The work maps to that clerk occupation, whose profile describes routine calculating, posting and verifying duties.
Anchor the band, meaning the pay range you would actually offer, to the wrong neighbor and the number is wrong before you negotiate. Accountants and Auditors is a different occupation, described as examining, analyzing and interpreting accounting records to prepare financial statements, give advice, or audit and evaluate statements prepared by others (O*NET, Accountants and Auditors, 13-2011.00). A payables seat scoped to processing is not doing that work, and pricing it there sets an expectation the duty list cannot support. What publishing a band then commits you to is worked through in what a staff accountant job description commits you to.
Keying Seat or Judgment Seat
One test settles which of the two you are describing: who owns the exceptions and the invoices that arrive with no purchase order behind them.
If those exceptions reach this seat only for keying, after somebody else has resolved them, you are describing a processing role. If they arrive for resolution, the seat needs someone who can tell a stale order from a wrong invoice, and the qualifications change even though the incompatible pairs do not. Where each kind of failed invoice belongs, and the ceiling non-PO invoices put on all of it, is set out in invoice processing automation.
Write that duty into the description with the system named and a frequency attached, for the evidentiary reason set out in what a staff accountant job description commits you to. Monitoring is a separate matter. The Accounts Payable Guide gives the supervisor the job of watching the nature and extent of invoices held for payment because of discrepancies, so a description that asks the processing seat to monitor its own held invoices has asked one person to check their own work.
When the Firm Is Too Small to Split Them
If your firm cannot split these duties, the description should say so rather than imply a separation that does not exist. The Accounts Payable Guide takes that case directly: a smaller organization with conflicting duties it cannot segregate can modify accordingly and describe the compensating duties it has in place instead.
The segregation of duties guide shows one shape for a single-person accounting function. The clerk processes invoices and prepares the checks. A second person, who does not process anything, reviews the supporting documentation, approves the invoices, and signs and mails the checks. Both guides are written for Washington local governments, and the certifying role has a statutory name there that a firm will not use, but the pairings are about the transaction rather than the entity, so they carry across.
Name the compensating control on the description, name who performs it, and put it on that person's description too. A monitoring control nobody is assigned is not a control.
One Question to Run the Page Through
Read the duties you have written as one question. Does anyone on this page both create a payment and let it out the door? The lines that answer yes are invoice approval, the vendor master file, payment release, bank reconciliation, procurement, journal entries and cash receipting. Name the ones this seat may not hold, in the document rather than in someone's memory.
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