26% of vendors still use pen and paper instead of software

One in four vendors in this survey isn't running their business on software built for the job. Pen, paper, or a spreadsheet is part of how 26.1% of vendors handle accounting, invoicing, or payments. For roughly 1 in 10 vendors overall, it's not a backup to something else. It's the entire system.

Who's actually running on paper alone

The 26.1% figure counts anyone who uses pen, paper, or a spreadsheet anywhere in their process, and that's not the same as using nothing else. Plenty of vendors keep a spreadsheet running alongside QuickBooks or another tool. Strip out everyone who also uses at least one piece of real accounting or invoicing software, and the share left running on paper alone, with no software of any kind, drops to 10.8%.

That's the more striking number. It means about 4 in 10 of the vendors who touch paper or a spreadsheet have absolutely nothing else in their stack: no QuickBooks, no Stripe, no industry-specific tool, nothing.

QuickBooks leads the field by a wide margin at 58.5%, and the rest of the market is split across a long tail of smaller platforms. Paper still outranks every one of them except QuickBooks itself.

Why the paper habit persists

Nothing in this survey asked vendors why they haven't switched, but the rest of the data offers a reasonable answer: most of the vendors in this survey are small. 64% run with 25 or fewer employees, and 30% bring in under $250K a year. At that scale, a manual process is often genuinely good enough, right up until it isn't. Software has a setup cost, in time and often in dollars, and a solo operator or a two-person crew doesn't always see an immediate, obvious return on paying for a tool to do what a notebook already does.

The standardization vendors say they want

The vendors who have already adopted software aren't exactly settled on one system either. Beyond QuickBooks, no single platform holds more than 16.5% of the market, and vendors notice the fragmentation.

"All vendors in the same industry should use the same platform for payment, for cohesiveness."

-Construction vendor, 11 to 25 employees

That's the real opening for the vendors still on paper. They're not choosing between ten different platforms. They're choosing between doing nothing and picking whatever tool finally makes the switch worth it.

Where this leaves the holdouts

Paper and spreadsheets aren't a dying habit at the edges of this market. They're a real, sizable category, and a meaningful share of that category has no digital tool of any kind. That's not a small niche to convert. It's roughly 1 in 10 vendors starting from zero, which is a different problem than getting someone to switch platforms. It's getting someone onto a system for the first time.

This finding comes from our 2026 Vendor Payment & Portal Report, which covers five other themes across payments, portals, and compliance. The full report has all the underlying data, and the recap of all six findings, "2026 Vendor Payment Report: What 400+ Vendors Told Us About Getting Paid" ties the whole study together in one place.