Learn How Prevent the Budget drain caused by Double invoice Values and Perfect the Payment Methods in Your Accounts tools
Duplicate paymentsare one of numerous types of overpayment mistakes that arise within the accounts payable management section. The Institute of Internal Auditors have highlighted that duplicate payments make up between 0.5% and 0.1% of yearly supplier bill payments which means one in a 1000 bills could be a duplicate. If your organisation makes £50 million in yearly invoice payments you are likely paying out £50,000 or more in duplicate payments per year..
How Do They Happen?
A typical invoice entry includes an invoice number, date, amount, supplier number and many other fields. If any of these fields are enteredmistakenly or inconsistently, the software’s inherent check for duplicate payment will not be effective. Add to this fact there might not be a clear invoice numbering system it’s clear to see how overpayments can slip through the net.
Internal Solution
This problem issue can be resolved by implementing 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 applicable, Purchase Order number can also be useful.
-For convenience, and to produce a fewer 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 aggravation 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 demand the use of a system that can identify classify the items most likely to be duplicates.
-Query results should of course be listed in descending order of monetary amount and probability of being a duplicate.
3.) Trace suspected items back to their supporting documents using recovery audit software.
4.) Contact overpaid vendors, and ask for repayment or a credit note.
-This step may require some tact, but vendors are likely to be co-operative with their existing customers. Problems are more likely when contacting former suppliers.
FISCAL Technologies is the only organisation to specialise in overpayment detection solutions. We empower Accounts Payable exectives and have analysed client data from all the key financial systems and in 100% of cases we have discovered accidental overpayments that they were ingnorant of saved each many thousands of dollars. We offer a no expense duplicate payment health check and checklistto all qualifying organisations.
Please visit - www.fiscaltechnologies.com
Filed under: Accounting Software, Software
