$20M+
P&L impact identified across regions
$45B
Procurement spend analysed
3.5M
Invoices processed annually
2TB+
Data collected and processed
Operating Context
A disciplined operation, at global scale
AB InBev buys goods and services worth billions of dollars from thousands of vendors worldwide. Managing the financial side of a procurement system at that spread is complicated. Even at 99 percent accuracy, leakage remains in the procure-to-pay process and it carries real financial consequences.
Anheuser-Busch InBev, Belgium
Multinational drinks conglomerate; the world's largest brewer by volume and revenue, at $53.5B annual revenue
600+ brands, 150 countries
Including Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois and Beck's, supplied by an 8,000-strong vendor base
2 years+ partnership
Contract signed after an eight-week proof of value, now running across five regions
High Volume Of
– 3.5 million invoices entered every year across global entities
– Purchases, payables and vendor records spanning $45B of spend
– Rebates, allowances and pricing terms negotiated vendor by vendor
Complex Environment Combining
– A matrix organisation running a complex ERP landscape
– Many internal tools and processes, each owned by a different team
– Global teams where an OCR miss in one region never surfaces in another
The Problem
Identifying Root Causes Of Procure-To-Pay Leakage & False Positives
The leakage was worth $100M a year, and none of it looked like an error. Values were mistyped into the ERP. The OCR engine read invoices it could not fully parse. Internal attempts to catch it produced more false positives than recoveries, and 200+ distinct leakage points stayed open across the network.
"Even if you are 99 percent correct, there are likely to be leaks in the procure-to-pay process that have financial repercussions. At our volume, that one percent is not a rounding error — it is nine figures of exposure a year."
01
Manual entry, at scale
Values keyed into the ERP by hand across 3.5 million invoices a year.
02
OCR that quietly fails
Invoice capture misreads fields, and the posted document still looks valid.
03
False positives, not findings
Internal rules flagged volume no team could triage, so real claims went unworked.
04
200+ leakage points
Spread across entities, tools and teams, with no single owner or view.
Each gap is small. Across $45B of spend and millions of documents they compound into tens of millions a year, which is why a one-time clean-up was never the answer — the leakage regenerates with every new invoice cycle.
How We Solved It
5 Steps To Automated Invoice Recovery
AB-Innovation Brewery, the innovation arm of AB InBev, recognised the opportunity inside the procure-to-pay process and onboarded Discover Dollar to find the leakages with its proprietary algorithm. The trial ran on live procurement data — purchases, payables and invoices — through five steps.
8,000
Suppliers in scope
1TB+
Source data ingested at trial
8 weeks
Idea to recovered dollars
01
Collection of data
Purchases, payables, invoices and vendor masters connected securely, with no disruption to existing AP workflows.
02
Structuring & analysis
Records from a fragmented ERP and tool landscape normalised into one analysable set.
03
Claims identified by AI
Machine-learning models group leakages by type and suppress the false positives internal rules produced.
04
Claim approval
Only P&L-impacting claims are packaged for AB InBev finance teams to validate and raise.
05
Million-dollar impact
Recovered cash lands directly in profit and cash flow, and the same signal catches the next cycle.
Within a few weeks Discover Dollar recovered millions of dollars in leakage that would otherwise have been lost forever — money returned straight to profits and cash flows, with no new system for AP teams to learn.
Value Delivered
Real-Time, Multi-Region Cash Recovery
Year one proved the model in Europe. The following year the same engine scaled across North America, Middle America, Africa and South America, taking the identified P&L impact past $20 million.
Primary Scenario
Procure-to-pay overpayments & revenue leakages
$20M+
identified P&L impact
Overpayments and unclaimed revenue sitting inside invoices already posted as correct. Discovered in eight weeks against $45B of analysed spend, then re-run continuously as new invoices enter the system.
Manual ERP entry errors OCR capture failures Unclaimed vendor revenue 200+ leakage pointsThe recovery breaks down across four key measures:
Discovered in the first 8 weeks
Purchases, payables and invoices
Across the trial and the scale-out
Continuous recovery, not a one-off audit
One root cause, many regions: value genuinely earned under vendor terms, slipping between what was agreed and what the system actually captured.
That's the case for running recovery as a permanent layer inside the AP function rather than a periodic project.
"During the first year, Discover Dollar helped us in finding million-dollar in terms of P&L impact in Europe. And this year we are scaling to North America, Middle America, Africa and South America, and the total P&L impact Discover Dollar has identified for us is a total of $20M — which is very precious given the impact of the pandemic on our business."
Pritam Dutta
Director of Innovation, Finance & Digital Transformation, AB InBev
From the Discover Dollar Side
"AB InBev was one of the quickest companies to move from idea to results in a matter of weeks. Unlike many corporates, they move at lightning speed to get things done. We are glad that AB InBev and Innovation Brewery put their faith in us, and we were able to deliver what we promised."
Subu, CEO, Discover Dollar
Recognition
Most Innovative Solution Award — SAP
NASSCOM Emerge 50 — Retail Tech Award, 2020
Ongoing partnership — Creative Destruction Lab
Frequently Asked
FAQs
More than $20 million, starting with a million-dollar impact in Europe in year one and expanding as the engine scaled to North America, Middle America, Africa and South America.
Overpayments and revenue leakages worth $20M+ were discovered within eight weeks of onboarding, run on live procurement data through Discover Dollar's proprietary algorithm.
The leakage came from manual entry errors and OCR capture failures inside a matrix organisation running many ERPs, tools and regional processes. Internal attempts produced more false positives than recoveries, leaving 200+ leakage points open.
Ongoing. AB InBev signed a 2 years+ contract, so recovery runs as a permanent layer inside the AP function and catches new leakage as fresh invoices enter the system.
Existing procurement data only: purchases, payables, invoices and vendor masters — 1TB+ at trial and 2TB+ in total — connected securely with no disruption to existing AP workflows.
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