Duplicate Payment Prevention

Almost all Accounts Payable system will only flag a duplicate invoice if all the data elements of the invoice match exactly.

• Invoice Number field – AP systems cannot determine the difference between “0123” and “123”. Even if then invoice
• Invoice Date field – Most system will not stop a duplicate if the invoice date is different on the duplicate invoice entered.
• Amount – Most system will not stop a duplicate if the invoice amount is different on the duplicate invoice entered.
• Currency – Some, not all system will allow a invoices to processed a second time where all other data elements are the same but currency.

One of the largest reason that duplicate payments occur is from an unclean vendor master. If your vendor master file contains duplicated vendors you are risk of duplicate payments. Almost all AP system will all the processing of the same invoice under two vendor master files.

P-Card usage has increased drastically. All with it is the risk of duplicate payments. If a invoice was paid utilized a credit card and another invoice was paid by processing an invoice … how would your system know it occurred?

Automation of invoice processing is a wonderful thing. Processing invoices manually is time consuming and expensive. But some automation technology is a bolt-on to make companies AP systems. They usually do no have the duplicate payment identification.

Web portals can unintentionally create duplicate payments when vendors submit invoices through multiple channels — for example, uploading them to the portal and also emailing them to Accounts Payable. If the portal doesn’t validate against existing invoices or if data is re-keyed manually from the portal into the ERP, duplicates can easily occur. Timing issues, resubmissions after upload errors, and differences in file formats or invoice numbers can also cause the same invoice to be processed twice.