Slide 1 - Tests to Find Duplicate Invoices

Duplicate payment of invoices can cost a large company millions of dollars a year; we recovered over $4 million for one client alone. Even if a vendor has controls to identify duplicate billings from their end, which is rare, not all of them are forthcoming if your company pays for a good or service twice. You may think you're covered because your accounting system disallows the entry of the same invoice number from the same vendor. What about the two invoices from a vendor for the same good or service that are numbered 101a and 101/a, or 101A? Your system won't recognize those as duplicates. Or what about the payables clerk who manually overrides the control, or inserts a punctuation mark into the invoice number just to get the invoice processed? What if the vendor sends two invoices for the same good or service with two completely different invoice numbers?

As you can see in the first slide below, data analysis software allows us to create new invoice number fields in which the punctuation is stripped and the letters are capitalized. From there, as in second slide, we can extract payables records with the same vendor, same New Invoice Number, and test all of those. In the third slide, we've run a second type of duplicate invoice test in which we've removed our dependency on the invoice number field and extracted records which include the same vendor, same date, same amount. The slide below shows you a portion of a $750,000 recovery we made for a client from duplicate billings from one vendor! We cut out the vendor name because it's a name you would recognize.