Many people have never heard of an accounts payable audit, or the recovery audit software that can put right budgetary errors. The issue is that however careful your staff, mistakes will always occur; this is a reality in any department, as well as accounts. This means that discrepancies will inevitably occur, and in many cases that means you will be making overpayments to suppliers and third parties. Research indicates that roughly one in a thousand payments is an overpayment. While that doesn’t sound like a problem, if you run a high-volume, low-margin business then it can all add up and those mistaken transactions can drain your profits. Duplicate payments are just one of several kinds of error, but they are the most common because they are the ones that slip through the net most unnoticed. Some are genuine errors, others are intentional and submitted fraudulently. An audit can demonstrate where this is happening and stop it.
The trouble is that invoices are complicated – the average one has perhaps twelve different fields of data, and when these are copied into your accounts then discrepancies show up. Duplicate payments can occur when the same invoice is given twice. This can easily happen, since many suppliers will provide services on a monthly basis. But what if they send their invoice twice in one month? You are expecting the payment so it doesn’t raise any eyebrows. Would you recognise it if another one turned up? They might be settled by different people in the accounts department.
It is this type of problem, and many others like it, that an accounts payable audit can uncover. Duplicate payments are the most common and most worrying of mistaken transactions, but there are plenty of others. The effect of these can be to harm your financial stability – and at a time of continued belt-tightening, no one can afford to be complacent. The good news is that recovery audit software can go through your accounts, showing up all the occasions on which such errors have occurred in the past. This allows you to seek redress. In fact, you can demand repayment for the last six years. However, it’s worth moving now, since if the person or organisation has gone bankrupt or ceased trading, there is no comeback. But with six years of mistaken payments on offer, that can form a very handy windfall, and ensure that similar mistakes happen far less often in the future.
Please visit https://www.fiscaltec.com/ for further info.