What is Straight-through processing?
Straight-through processing (STP) is when a transaction moves from start to finish with no manual touch. The STP rate is the share of items that complete that way.
In more detail
The term comes from payments and trading, where a settlement either flows through untouched or falls out for repair. In operations generally, the STP rate is the headline metric for automation: of 1,000 invoices, how many were captured, matched and posted with no human? Quoting it without a definition is misleading. Say which stages it covers and whether an approve click counts as a touch. A realistic target is not 100 percent. Pushing the rate too high means automating rare, risky cases badly. We track STP rate next to error rate, because a high rate with rising errors is a failure.
Example
A team processes 2,000 invoices a month and 1,300 post without a touch, so its STP rate is 65 percent. The other 700 go to the exception queue, and the top three reasons account for most of them.