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What Makes a Strong Accounts Payable Audit in High-Volume Environments?

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It becomes increasingly hard to keep accounts payable under control as the number of transactions increases. Thousands or even millions of invoices can be handled by different suppliers, business units, ERP systems, approval processes, and payments.

There are controls in place for most organizations. The invoices can be matched, the approvals can be made, and the payments can be processed using the existing system. But these controls may not reveal all the financial discrepancies.

These may include duplicate payments, wrong prices, unrecorded credits, problems related to supplier master data, and contract differences. Individually, these problems may seem very insignificant. But in the high-volume AP environment, they may result in considerable financial leakage.

This is why an effective account payable audit goes beyond the review of sample invoices and making sure that the individual invoice went through the correct process. It involves analyzing huge volumes of data, connecting information from different systems, identifying unusual patterns, and determining how money was paid out.

Why Do High-Volume AP Environments Face Audit Complications?

An AP department can manually process each invoice in a small-scale environment. This is not feasible in an environment where the company processes many invoices per day in its various business units.

Some of the characteristics of a high volume environment include:

  • Having more than one ERP system as a result of acquisitions or expansion
  • Having different AP processes for different business units and geographical locations
  • Having many suppliers and many master files
  • Processing a lot of PO and non-PO invoices
  • Having many payment methods and workflows
  • Having contracts with various prices and service terms
  • Various transaction data in other systems

It is not only the amount of data that creates the problem. It is the connections within the data.

An invoice may be correct when considered on its own. However, the same invoice could show a problem when viewed against its related purchase order, supplier agreement, payment pattern, or transaction in another ERP system.

Thus, for a good audit, there must be consideration of the bigger picture in terms of payments.

What Makes a Better Account Payable Audit?

The success of an accounts payable auditing cannot be measured based only on the number of transactions analyzed. The quality of analysis, the scope of data, and the possibility to implement recoveries based on the findings are just as important.

1. Comprehensive and Relevant AP Data

The first step towards conducting an effective audit is having the data to analyze.

Only analyzing a limited number of invoices could result in missing out on many potential recoveries. The audit in high volume environments requires access to relevant data sources, which include invoices, payments, purchase orders, suppliers' data, and other transaction information.

The goal is to have a comprehensive picture of transactions, rather than analyzing samples.

Data preparation is another important aspect.

The inconsistencies in the supplier's name, duplicates, missing data, and different data structures may impact the audit findings.

To uncover the relationships in the data, it should be structured first.

2. Cross-system visibility

Large-scale enterprises hardly operate with an appropriate unified financial system.

One company could implement SAP for a certain unit, Oracle for another, and any other ERP for an acquisition. All these systems will have their own records of suppliers, invoice numbers, payment history, etc.

This poses a serious auditing problem.

Two payments that are identical cannot be recognized as identical if the payments take place in different systems. In addition, the same supplier will have different names depending on the business units.

Auditing, therefore, should be able to bring all this information together. The approach by various companies is aimed at identifying issues within complex AP systems.

3. Smarter duplicate detection

Duplicate payments are one of the most common account payable audit findings, yet detecting them is not always easy.

Traditional matching could involve invoice numbers, supplier ID numbers, amounts, and dates of transactions. These criteria will easily detect obvious duplicates, but practical duplicates can appear quite differently.

For instance:

  • Invoice numbers could have some formatting differences
  • A supplier can re-issue the same invoice using a new number
  • There can be multiple records for the same supplier
  • There can be one and the same payment made by other departments
  • There could be an invoice going through both manual and automated procedures
The more advanced audit will consider relationships between transactions instead of relying solely on matching. It gives the finance department a chance to check for possible duplicate payments that cannot be detected otherwise.

4. Validating price and contract

The invoice is processed appropriately as per the details in the ERP and can still be financially wrong. This takes place when a system highlights outdated costing or never fully captures the terms and conditions as per the agreement.

For instance, a supplier's agreement can provide a negotiated unit price, volume discount, rebate, or service rate. When the terms above do not match properly in the procurement or invoicing process, the supplier may continue charging for an amount that is greater than it should be charged for.

Every single invoice might seem proper on its own. A mismatch can be seen only when the invoice is matched with the related contract terms. That is why it is very important that a good AP audit links together the contract, PO, invoice, and payment, wherever it is needed.

5. Analyzing supplier master data

Another layer of difficulty arises with the supplier data. The same vendor might be treated differently in different units due to the following reasons:

  • Company name
  • Address
  • Tax details
  • Banking details
  • Supplier ID
  • Legal entity

This makes it hard to establish links between transactions.

For instance, two companies might refer to the same vendor. The fact that such vendors are recorded as two separate records prevents combining payments to both entities.

Thus, an effective audit should focus on vendor relationships rather than assuming that all vendor records are independent of each other. This will allow identifying duplicate payments, fragmented spending, and other potential risks embedded in supplier master data.

From Transaction Review to AP Intelligence

A huge accounts payable audit should not only address incorrect invoices. Besides that, it needs to help the financial departments understand:

  • The point where there is leakage
  • The kinds of mistakes that are being made repetitively
  • The vendors or internal business units posing greater risk
  • The reason why controls are failing to detect some problems
  • The potential value to be recovered
  • What improvements in the process will ensure similar mistakes aren't made

It takes more than just checking transactions on an individual basis.

With the analysis of the AP data that involves comparing invoices, vendors, contracts, purchase orders, and payments, one can start spotting patterns that can't be detected manually.

Creating A Better AP Auditing Strategy

An optimal AP audit should not only generate a lot of findings. It should rather help finance executives get a better insight into their losses and what needs to be done about them.

High transactional environments need a wider scope of data, multi-system analysis, smart exception detection, vendor matching, contract verification, and a well-designed process of value recovery and remediation.

When these components are implemented successfully, an audit ceases to be just another routine check of the financial processes. Moreover, it starts helping to identify leakage, recover value, and tighten control over the entire process.

Discover Dollar enables enterprise finance teams to discover discrepancies and recovery potential. The company also analyzes complex accounts payable environments and improves financial controls through AI data analysis and audit expertise.

Frequently asked questions

What does the account payable audit consist of?−
Accounts payable auditing involves a systematic review of transactions and information such as invoices, payments, suppliers' information, payment records, and purchase orders. It discovers mistakes, overpayments, duplicate payments, pricing mistakes, and missed credits.
What is the significance of accounts payable auditing for high-transaction companies?+
What elements make for a good accounts payable audit?+
How does AI assist accounts payable auditing?+
How does Discover Dollar help in AP audits?+