Twenty-five years of AP audit and analytics: the stories, the opinions, and the things experience teaches you. Mostly AP, not always.
Who buys gift cards on a purchasing card? One cardholder had $10,000 worth, all sitting in the Level 3 data nobody was reading.
I once told a VP that 52% of his spend was on POs and nearly got fired for it. Here’s what that fight taught me about when to PO and when not to.
A brewery on brand-new SAP couldn’t close its books. The culprit? Buyers entering $0.01 as a placeholder price, and a system that took them literally.
Hundreds of dating-service charges on a manufacturer’s purchasing cards. I assumed it was a data error. It wasn’t.
Same invoice, same date, same amount: one digit off on the vendor number. A $249,000 payment, a photographer, and a four-day head start.
A $1.2 million recovery that built invisibly for years, and the “apply it to the oldest PO” habit at the center of it.
“I thought SAP made that impossible.” SAP’s duplicate check is real, but its defaults leave gaps. How it works, and where it breaks.
Oracle Fusion Payables checks for duplicate invoices, but per business unit, mostly on the invoice number, with a hold that can be released. Here’s where duplicates slip through.
Open credits on supplier books used to sit for 5+ years. Now they vanish in 18–24 months. Here’s where they go, and why continuous audits matter.
“We require a PO for everything, so duplicates can’t happen.” More than 52% of the duplicates we validate have a PO attached. Here’s how.
