Usually both, and the framing is wrong. The question is not whether to hire a person or buy software. It is which parts of that seat are repetitive enough that a system should own them, and which parts need judgement that no system is going to supply.
Sometimes the answer is that you should make the hire. If the work is mostly exception handling, vendor relationships and chasing people, automating it will make things worse and cost you money to do it.
Why software keeps losing to a salary
An owner will pay $75,000 for a person over $18,000 for software that does much of the same work, and that is not irrational.
Software hands the work back to you as a project to manage. A person takes it away.
What the owner is buying is the transfer of a nagging obligation to somebody else. Software does not do that. It gives you a tool, a login, an implementation, and a new thing to be responsible for. Every automation pitch that opens with "we can do your AP for less than a salary" is answering a question the owner did not ask, and that is why those pitches stall at "send me some info".
The test that actually decides it
Go through the job description you wrote and mark each line one of three ways.
| Mark it | When | What happens to it |
|---|---|---|
| Automate | Same inputs, same steps, same output, every time | A system should own it |
| Assist | A person decides, but the gathering is mechanical | Keep the person, remove the gathering |
| Human | Judgement, exceptions, relationships, negotiation | Do not touch it |
If the automate column does not add up to at least twenty hours a month, you have a hiring problem rather than an automation problem, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.
What to check before you spend anything
- —What your current software already does that somebody is doing by hand. This is the most common finding and it costs nothing to fix.
- —Whether the seat exists because work overflowed from someone already there, in which case you are hiring to fix a distribution problem.
- —Whether the process is written down anywhere, or lives in one person’s head. If it is the latter, that is the real risk and it is separate from this decision.
The part that compounds
Whichever way you go, get the process documented while it is being done. Not afterwards, not as a project. The reason the cycle is expensive is that the knowledge leaves with the person, and documentation is the only thing that stops that. It is also the one part of this that gets more valuable every month.
If you have not priced the hire yet, do that first: what an accounts payable coordinator actually costs. Then compare it against a seat where the process gets written down as the work is done.
That is what Coordinator by CTRL TECH is, and it starts with an audit that tells you to make the hire if that is the honest answer.