There’s a maxim that businesses that start in a recession tend to be leaner and tougher than those which get going in easier times. The same is broadly true, though to a lesser extent, of businesses that survive a recession. Some make it because they slim down and make every pound count; others only because they have reserves to rely on and not because their model is sound. Either way, a recession is a good time to make sure that waste is at a minimum and you are making the most of every opportunity. That goes for your accounts as well as advertising and product design or service provision. An accounts payable audit can show up where you have been going wrong for potentially years, without realising it – those areas such as duplicate payments where you have been throwing money away, solely because your accounts processes aren’t up to the job of pinpointing where errors and fraud are most likely to occur. Thus recovery audit software can have two helpful purposes: it can enable you to reclaim money lost in past overpayments, and it can help protect you from making the same mistakes again in the future.
When a company starts out, its accounts might be quite simple. A relatively small number of suppliers and clients (perhaps just one of each), and small, predictable payments. That’s easy enough to keep track of, but when your business grows you might find yourself adding new clients and complexity to a system that was never designed to keep up with it. That becomes time-consuming to administrate, for starters. Unfortunately, it also becomes vulnerable to errors, and even fraud. Even a single invoice itself is quite complex, with maybe a dozen different fields of data. The scope for discrepancies is large, and multiplies with the number of clients you have. Plus, some will always be unscrupulous and willing to see whether they can take advantage of your system’s inadequacies by filing duplicate invoices.
Duplicate payments represent the single largest category of overpayment, but there are many others. That’s why recovery audit software is so vital: it enables you to find exactly where the errors are creeping in, and to plug the gaps. Given that an estimated 0.1 percent of payments are spurious, an accounts payable audit can save a lot of money – especially if your business thrives on high numbers of transactions. In fact, it can make all the difference between going under and staying afloat – and will stand you in good stead for when the economic climate improves.
More at: http://www.fiscaltec.com/uk/