The Secret Of How To Eliminate the Expense caused by Poor audit Features and Increase the Processes in Your Accounts organisation
January 22nd, 2008Duplicate bills are one of many types of overpayment errors that occur within the accounts payable management section. The Institute of Internal Auditors have established that duplicate payments make up between 0.5% and 0.1% of annual supplier bill payments which means one in a 1000 bills could be a duplicate. If your organisation makes £50 million in annual invoice payments you are likely paying out £50,000 or more in duplicate payments per year..
How Do They Occur?
ERP or Accounting software should have the controls in place to flag, track or catch duplicate payments overpayments. Yet, the probability of human error means none of the packages are sophisticated enough to prevent more than about 70% occurrence. The Institute of Management and Administration concludes that “Completely eliminating duplicate payments using recovery audit software may be an impossible dream”..
recovery audit software
This problem issue can be resolved by carrying out out the following steps :
1.) Obtain a record of the full payment history
The key data items which are needed are Supplier Reference, Invoice Number, Amount and Invoice Date. Where appropriate, Purchase Order number can also be useful.
-For convenience, and to produce a lesser number of suspected duplicates, it is often useful to split out suppliers such as landlords where the payments are always constantly the same identical amount.
-The data should include credit items. This will reduce the irritation of finding large duplicate payments which have already been found with recovery audit software or where errors have been immediately reversed at the time of entry.
2.) Query the data using specialist duplicate-finding techniques or system.
-This will need the use of a system that can identify categorise the items most likely to be duplicates.
-Query results should of course be listed in descending order of monetary amount and chance of being a duplicate.
3.) outline suspected items back to their supporting documents using recovery audit software.
4.) Contact overpaid suppliers, and request repayment or a credit note.
-This step may require some tact, but suppliers are likely to be co-operative with their existing customers. Problems are possible when contacting former suppliers.
FISCAL Technologies is the only organisation to specialise in overpayment detection software. We empower Accounts Payable professionals and have analysed client data from all the main financial systems and in 100% of cases we have discovered accidental overpayments that they were ingnorant of saved each many thousands of euros. We offer a no expense overpayment health check and report to all qualifying organisations.
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