Articles

In many ways, overpayments in an organisation’s ERP system are intangible, not noticed – and if left for too long – unrecoverable. It remains a fact that if you’re processing over 25,000 invoices a year, you will also be processing duplicates. The supplier may highlight the error, but often it’s either overlooked by both parties, or deliberately ignored. In the latter case, it’s interesting to note that this is often not thought of as fraud by the guilty party. Of course the onus should be on the buyer to ensure that their payment process is correct, but if the supplier notices, and then does nothing, then that is another issue entirely.

If you work within the public sector you could be forgiven for feeling more than a little anxious over the last couple of months. You’ve been aware that cuts are coming, but you didn’t know when, how much, or if they’d affect you directly. Many of those within the corporate sector have been under the same cloud, though perhaps without the same inevitability.

No-one likes to think that their organisation, or their department could be at risk from fraud – yet the fact remains that AP is one of the most vulnerable departments in this area. Quite simply, the people who work there have easy access to all the money leaving the company. So it’s in your interest to learn to detect the tale-tale signs that something suspicious is going on.

You don't have many dealings with foreign currency - so why should you be concerned with exchange rate fluctuations?   The answer is, that in our increasingly global economy, you're likely to be wrong.

No matter how isolated your organisation seems to be from large scale foreign transactions, it's likely that at some level it will be affected.  In some large organisations where exposure to the threat of currency fluctuations is a relatively new phenomena - many AP departments simply hand over the responsibility to their central banking partners.  In many cases their bank will be acting with their own best interests at heart, and not those of their client.  This situation is compounded further when AP departments have a rigid payment system whereby invoices must be paid on or by a certain date regardless of what may be happening in the markets.