Duplicate bills are one of many types of overpayment mistakes that transpire within the accounts payable management area. The Institute of Internal Auditors have established that duplicate payments make up between 0.5% and 0.1% of yearly vendor invoice payments which means one in a 1000 payments could be a duplicate. If your company makes £50 million in yearly invoice payments you are possibly 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 highlight, track or catch duplicate payments overpayments. Yet, the chance of human error means none of the packages are sophisticated enough to prevent more than about 70% occurrence. The Institute of Management and Administration agrees 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 the subsequent steps :
1.) Obtain a data 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 helpful.
-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 frustration 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 sophisticated duplicate-finding techniques or system.
-This will need the use of a system that can identify recognise the items most likely to be duplicates.
-Query results should of course be listed in descending order of monetary amount and prospect of being a duplicate.
3.) outline 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 company to specialise in overpayment detection solutions. We empower Accounts Payable controllers and have analysed customer data from all the key financial systems and in 100% of cases we have discovered accidental overpayments that they were unaware of saved each many thousands of pounds. We offer a no cost duplicate payment health check and report to all qualifying organisations.

Please visit - www.fiscaltechnologies.com