Accounts Payable Audit: Is Now The Right Moment?
Many people have never heard of an accounts payable audit, or the recovery audit software that can redress budgetary errors. The reality is that however careful your staff, mistakes will always occur; this is true in any department, as well as accounts. This means that discrepancies will inevitably arise, and in many cases that means you will be making overpayments to suppliers and others. Research indicates that around one in a thousand payments is an overpayment. While that doesn’t sound like much, if you run a high-volume, low-margin business then it can all add up and those mistaken transactions can sap your profits. Duplicate payments are just one of many kinds of error, but they are the most common because they are the ones that slip through the net most easily. Some are genuine errors, others are intentional and submitted fraudulently. An audit can show where this is happening and stop it.
The problem 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 arise. Duplicate payments can occur when the same invoice is submitted 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 spot it if another one turned up? They might be dealt with by different people in the accounts department.
It is this kind of problem, and many others like it, that an accounts payable audit can uncover. Duplicate payments are the most common and most insidious of mistaken transactions, but there are plenty of others. The effect of these can be to undermine 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 crawl through your accounts, uncovering 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 quickly, since if the person or organisation has gone bankrupt or ceased trading, there is no comeback. But with six years of overpayments on offer, that can form a very welcome windfall, and ensure that similar mistakes happen far less often in the future.
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