Although the Duplicate payments number and size is usually less than compliance or pricing errors this type of overpayment is largely feared by accounts payable management as the accountability is on them to ensure that these errors do not occur by using recovery audit software.
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 inputted inaccurately or inconsistently, the software’s inherent check for duplicate payment will not be effective. Add to this fact there might not be a defined invoice numbering system it’s reasonable to observe how overpayments can slip through the net.
recovery audit software
This problem issue can be resolved by carrying out the following steps :
1.) Obtain a data of the full payment history
The key data fields which are required are Supplier Reference, Invoice Number, Amount and Invoice Date. Where appropriate, Purchase Order number can also be valuable.
-For convenience, and to produce a smaller number of suspected duplicates, it is often useful to divide 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 recovered with recovery audit software or where errors have been immediately reversed at the time of entry.
2.) Query the data using dedicated 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 probability of being a duplicate.
3.) track suspected items back to their supporting documents using recovery audit software.
4.) Contact overpaid suppliers, and ask for 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 probable when contacting former suppliers.
FISCAL Technologies is the only organisation to focus only on recovery audit software detection systems. We empower Accounts Payable controllers and have analysed client data from all the major financial systems and in 100% of cases we have discovered accidental overpayments that they were oblivious of saved each many thousands of euros. We offer a no cost overpayment health check and report to all qualifying organisations.
Please visit - www.fiscaltechnologies.com
January 13th, 2008
Posted by
hroberts
Business, Software, Accounting
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