Duplicate payments are a threat to the profits of big businesses

The larger a business grows, the more significant a role its accounts payable audit department will have. A certain percentage of invoice payments, estimated by Fiscal Technologies to be between 0.5 per cent and 0.1 per cent, are, in fact, duplicate payments. Of course, it is very difficult to say exactly how much of a loss this constitutes for the company, since each invoice payment is for a certain amount. So, if you are lucky, a duplicate might occur for a small payment, or if you are not so lucky, a much larger payment will be duplicated. But, statistically speaking, it likely that 0.1 per cent of invoice expenditure will be copied unnecessarily. Recovery audit software is a way of recuperating the losses incurred by these duplications.

How do duplicate payments occur? Well, there is a multitude of ways in which this problem may arise. Commonly it stems from human error that consequently affects either the supplier’s or the in-house data entry system. Generally speaking, an invoice entry will require around twelve different fields to be filled in by a member of a data entry team, such as an invoice number, a quantity of supplies, a supplier number, a date, and a purchase order number.

The cost of recovery can be surprisingly high; independent recovery auditors may charge a huge commission – often in the region of fifty per cent – of the payments that they successfully recover for you. And that, of course, does not account for those that they fail to identify. With recovery audit software your accounts payable team can run audits daily, or weekly, in order to maximise your chances of paying no more than the right amounts.

A solution to this problem is increasingly urgent in uncertain, and challenging, economic times. Why? It is not only – or primarily – because the pressure increases on your own business to ‘do more with less’, as they say, and to cut waste and leakage from your expenditure. This is, of course, true, though, and the longer an organisation goes without an effective recovery solution, the older duplicate payments become, and the costlier it becomes to recover them. The main reason for the urgency is the range of factors in the economic climate that cannot be controlled. Again, the longer a payment goes unrecovered, the greater the risk becomes that suppliers relevant to the payments may go out of business. accounts payable audit teams are advised to make use of recovery audit software to safeguard companies against these specific dangers.

Please click http://www.fiscaltechnologies.com/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.fiscaltechnologies.com/