Pre-Event Auditing for a Managed Approach to Loss Prevention
Profit recovery is changing.
The focus on historical recoveries has, over the years, been enhanced by the provision of intelligence led recommendations by industry experts, so organizations can attempt to minimize profit leakage in-house.
However, in our fast-paced world, even the most sophisticated systems and robust process controls cannot prevent monies being lost through simple errors and genuine mistakes.
Headlines from around the world show the cost of these errors; a large banking corporation recently paid $176m in error through an “operational mistake”, which they are now struggling to recover. Duplicate payments are still commonplace for businesses across the world, and errors within contract management can result in overpaid rates and prices, or under-received supplier rebates.
In the current climate of economic uncertainty, historical recoveries will likely become more difficult, as companies become unable to repay monies owed due to financial difficulties, or even cease trading entirely.
APL have responded to this challenge by promoting a proactive, risk based ‘pre-event’ audit approach in addition to the traditional recovery audit, to ensure our clients receive their revenue in year, without risk of permanent loss.
Our Client-Centric Approach
APL work with some of the largest, most complex organizations on the planet, from multinational retailers and banking corporations, to local government bodies and charities. Nobody knows the challenges our clients face in preventing revenue loss better than we do.
Our highly experienced Audit Managers work alongside our clients, and using the skills of our in-house Development team, create bespoke audit software to analyse client data. Using these tools, we can audit our client data before supplier invoices are paid, or accounts receivable bills are raised, to ensure these are 100% accurate before they are entered onto the ledger.
In taking a proactive ‘Right First Time’ approach, our clients mitigate the risk of being unable to recover a historical error, whilst simultaneous supporting supply chains and service providers through an accurate and timely review of payments and billing.
Our Services
Like all of APL’s historical audits, we work with our client stakeholders to use a risk based approach to target the most likely areas of potential revenue loss, so that a pre-event audit can be used to prevent this occurring.
All of APL’s existing technology is designed to be utilized as a pre-event loss prevention tool, in addition to the bespoke solutions we develop for individual clients. However, unlike a historical review, which requires a team of recoveries specialists, we analyze your data through our specialist audit toolkit, to verify payments and billing before they are processed.
Examples of how our Right First Time approach can enhance a client’s loss prevention capabilities include:
Capture™
Capture™ is APL’s flagship Accounts Payable audit toolkit, containing all the modules needed to prevent incorrect payments being made to suppliers.
Capture™ runs across the whole of your Accounts Payable data, conducting a range of diagnostic tests to highlight potential payment errors, including duplicated payments, payments to an incorrect vendor, and excessively large payments versus the vendor profile.
This powerful toolkit is available for clients to use internally as a SaaS tool, or can be used by APL’s specialist team on the client’s behalf, to highlight and stop payment errors before they are made.
Invoice Price Check
Our invoice price check provides a deeper dive into the line level detail behind supplier invoices, ensuring these are accurate prior to approval to pay.
Our invoice price checking service is the equivalent of a four way matching process, matching invoices not only against the Purchase Order and Goods / Services Received, but also against the original contract, rate card or price file. The review can check the individual item price for goods, or baskets of goods, including those not for resale, as well as service contracts, for example project day rates or contractor expense claims.
APL’s Loss Prevention experts use our Pricing software module to analyze invoices at line and header level, to ensure relevant discounts have been received, any special pricing has been correctly applied, and that charges are in line with the Purchase Order and / or agreed terms of business.
Crucially, these checks are conducted prior to payment being released to the vendor, so that valid invoices can flow through to payment, and payments for queried invoices held whilst these are resolved.
Vendor Agreements
APL’s Vendor Agreement review is our solution to monitor and control the execution of your vendor contracts and agreements, ensuring billing for agreements is on time and accurate, so client commercial teams can concentrate on business as usual tasks.
Functionality includes calculating volume and turnover rebates, so you never miss hitting the next level of discount or rebate, as well as ensuring annual agreements, marketing contributions, and ad hoc vendor support payments are correctly calculated, billed and collected.
Depending on your requirement, we also offer additional capabilities for maximum organizational impact, such as a supplier performance matrix to manage SLAs and report against your unique KPIs, so a proactive approach can be taken to manage this risk, and inform buying decisions going forward.
Talk to our Team
Our team would love to speak with your stakeholders to build a review profile based on your existing approach to profit recovery, so we can support you in identifying the business areas which would benefit most from a proactive our Right First Time solution.
We will work together to design a bespoke solution, tailored to deliver maximum value and efficiency for your business, whilst ensuring a risk based, loss prevention approach to profit recovery.
For more information, contact our Head of Business Development, Sarah Green, at [email protected] to arrange an introduction to APL and our service.
