Top Tips To Remove the Lost money caused by Double invoice Elements and Perfect the Processes in Your Accounts activity
Duplicate bills are one of many types of overpayment errors that transpire within the accounts payable management function. The Institute of Internal Auditors have found that duplicate payments make up between 0.5% and 0.1% of annual supplier invoice payments which means one in a 1000 payments could be a duplicate. If your organisation makes £50 million in annual invoice payments you are probably paying out £50,000 or more in duplicate payments per year..
How Do They Happen?
A normal invoice entry includes an invoice number, date, amount, supplier number and many other fields. If any of these fields are enteredmistakenly or inconsistently, the system’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 understandable to see how overpayments can slip through the net.
Internal Solution
This problem issue can be resolved by completing out the next process :
1.) Obtain a data of the full payment history
The key data items which are required are Supplier Reference, Invoice Number, Amount and Invoice Date. Where appropriate, Purchase Order number can also be useful.
-For convenience, and to produce a fewer 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 collected 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 classify 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.) Trace suspected items back to their supporting documents using recovery audit software.
4.) Contact overpaid vendors, and demend 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 possible when contacting former suppliers.
FISCAL Technologies is the only organisation to focus only on overpayment detection solutions. We empower Accounts Payable executives and have analysed client data from all the key financial systems and in 100% of cases we have discovered accidental duplicate payments that they were unaware of saved each many thousands of pounds. We offer a no expense duplicate payment health check and report to all qualifying organisations.
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