Accounts payable audit: how they save companies millions
Accounts payable audits are used by many companies to cut back on unnecessary costs which may slip between the cracks within a busy organization. If a company suspects it is paying too much, high-quality recovery audit software can identify duplicate payments and disparities between payments negotiated and payments received. Typically, this software is installed alongside existing accounting software, and can be run on a regular basis to search for and analyse unnecessary payments or over-payments. Over time, these recovered payments often add up to millions of pounds. The software works across multiple departments, making sure that system disparities between accounting or data entry are identified and either abolished or accounted for by those dealing with finance.
A full-scale accounts payable audit will also involve accounts payable experts coming in to the organization to talk with staff, inspect systems, and make recommendations for doing things in a different way in order to prevent losses and overpayments before they happen. However, such an audit is not needed frequently. Reliable recovery audit software can run on its own once it is installed, showing results to staff in a clear and readable way, and automatically implementing necessary changes. Companies are typically encouraged to make corrective claims as soon as possible after the incorrect payment is made: during a delay, a supplier may go out of business, become impossible to contact, or simply spend the duplicate payments or overpayments made to them.
Often savings are made by identifying duplicate claims and incorrect statement claims by vendors. These are not necessarily deliberate attempts at fraud or incorrect payments: busy people, on both the supply and payments side, can make mistakes. Especially in a big organization, changes in complex invoicing systems, staff turnover and the structure of the company can mean that many payments slip through the net. Meanwhile unclaimed cheques, issues with incorrect currency conversion, application of taxes, VAT and discount offers, all cause problems.Â
Computers, however, have no margin of human error, which is why many companies opt for the forensic efficiency of recovery audit software. Precise data analysis is a sophisticated way to investigate and correct historical overpayments, and to make recommendations for avoiding error in the future. And if there is fraud going on at some level, in the company or with a supplier, the sooner itâs rooted out the better. The larger the organization, the more money they typically save by doing an accounts payable audit.
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