Who is collecting this information
Accounts Payable Professionals Group (APPG) is collecting these research responses and is responsible for how they are handled.
What happens to your answers
Your responses are transmitted to APPG and stored on APPG's server. This study is different from the working tools elsewhere on this site, which keep your working data in your browser. A research study only produces useful benchmarks if the answers reach us, so please do not assume your answers stay on your device.
While you are working through the questionnaire, your partial answers are kept in your own browser so that you can move backwards or recover from an accidental refresh. Nothing is sent to APPG until you press Submit on the final screen. If you close the questionnaire before submitting, your partial answers stay in your browser and APPG never receives them.
Why we are collecting it
To produce an independent industry benchmark of how Accounts Payable functions operate, and to publish the findings in the APPG State of Accounts Payable 2027 report. The data also supports recurring annual benchmarks such as AP automation rate, AI adoption, fraud exposure, and the APPG AP Confidence Index.
How results are reported
Responses are analyzed and reported in aggregate. APPG will not intentionally publish individual responses in a way that identifies you or your employer. Open-text answers may be quoted in aggregate reporting; if a quotation is used, APPG will not attribute it to a named individual or employer.
What we do not ask for
- Your employer's name is not a research field. The questionnaire never asks for it.
- The questionnaire does not ask for your name, email address, or phone number.
- There are no salary or compensation questions in this study.
- You can complete the entire survey without providing any contact information.
Please do not submit confidential information
Open-text answers are free-form and we cannot filter them for you. Please do not enter confidential company, supplier, banking, payment, customer, or personally identifiable information. Do not identify your employer, individual suppliers, financial institutions, employees, or specific fraud incidents.
Participation is voluntary
You may skip any question you prefer not to answer, and you may stop at any point before submitting. Several questions, including all of the fraud questions, are optional and offer a Prefer not to answer option.
Contact details are collected separately
If you ask to receive the report or to be invited to future research, those details are collected on a separate form after you submit your survey, and are stored in a separate file from the research responses. APPG does not store a key that joins a contact record to a research response. Your name and email are not attached to your answers.
What else is stored with a response
Alongside your answers, each response record holds an internal random response identifier, the survey version, the time you started and submitted, roughly how long the survey took, whether the response was completed or screened out, whether it was pilot or live data, and any campaign or source label present in the link you followed.
Your IP address is not stored as research data. To limit automated abuse, the server keeps a salted one-way hash of the connecting IP address in a separate short-lived file used only for rate limiting. It is not stored in the research dataset and cannot be reversed to recover the address.
Security and retention
The survey is served over HTTPS. Response data is stored on APPG's hosting account in a directory outside the public web root, so it is not reachable from any web address, and is readable only by authorized APPG administrators through a password-protected admin area.
APPG intends to retain research responses for as long as they are useful for longitudinal year-over-year comparison, which is the purpose of an annual benchmark study. Contact records are retained until you ask to be removed.
Analytics
APPG may measure how many people view the study page, start the survey, and complete it. Your individual survey answers are not sent to web analytics. Only funnel events, such as "survey started" or "survey completed", are measured.
Methodology
This is an online opt-in, nonprobability industry study. Participants are recruited through APPG-owned channels and participating industry partners. Results should be interpreted as benchmarks of participating AP professionals rather than population estimates derived from probability sampling, and APPG does not report a conventional margin of error for this study.
Contact
Questions about this study, or a request to be removed from the contact list, can be sent through the APPG contact form. See also the APPG main site for the general site privacy policy.