Find Money FAST - Accounts Payable and Vendor Discounts

How often is your organisation paying on non-standard terms, paying in advance of the invoice due date or missing opportunities to take vendor payment discounts? Unfortunately, many organisations do not have the right tools to administer their payments and often miss their discount thresholds. If you are in an industry where debit notes and charge backs to vendors are common, you may have vendors with net debit balances. ACL audit analytics can help find the vendors that owe you money!

Analytics

1. Examine invoice and payment data to:

• Identify transactions where a discount is not applied to the payment. Profile discount amounts for each invoice by vendor to calculate discount percentage value. Segregate transactions by vendor where the percentage value deviates by more than a user-defined percentage.

2. Examine invoice and payment data to identify breakdowns of payment processing policy:

• Payments without an invoice. Matching of payment to invoice data to identify payments without a supporting invoice.
• Payments paid before due date. Matching of payment to invoice data to obtain payment date and then identify payment transactions processed before due date. Profile results by vendor.

3. Examine invoice and payment transactions to identify inconsistent payment terms by vendor:

• Match of payment data to invoice data to identify payment patterns. Identify transactions where vendor payments have multiple patterns. Profile by vendor and payment patterns.

4. Examine invoice and credit note data by vendor to identify vendors who report a net debit balance, where the vendor owes money.

Facts & Figures

Just 44% of companies with over 1,000 employees pay most of their invoices within specified discount terms. More than half of companies with over 1000 employees are not taking full advantage of available vendor discount terms [IOMA 2007]. Missing a 1% discount on a quarter of your payments can add up to $250,000 cash lost, for every $100 million in payments. On the other hand, paying invoices too quickly places needless pressure on cash resources and adds to the cost of financing working capital.

Furthermore, 4.6% of invoices contain errors and 44% of companies pay without original invoices [IOMA 2007].