How Duplicate Invoices Happen

Transcript: 

How Duplicate Payments Happen

Presented by Karl Andersson, AP Impact

Hi, this is Karl Andersson from AP Impact, and welcome to our video on how duplicate payments happen.

There are many reasons that duplicate payments happen within different companies. Today, what I’m going to go through is just more the common ones. There are going to be several nuanced ones depending on what type of ERP system you have or certain types of business processes. Even certain industries have different types of duplicates that other industries do not.

But today’s goal is just to go through what are some of the common ones — to give you an idea to think about: Are these occurring within your organization? And if they are, what can you do about it?

So, the key areas we’re going to go through are:
 • Cross-system duplicates
 • Same system duplicates
 • Interfaces
 • P-card or one-card solutions
 • Wire transfers

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Cross-System Duplicates

When I talk about cross-systems, these are organizations that have multiple accounts payable processing systems or multiple different ERP systems. This usually happens during acquisitions — one company gets acquired by another, and instantly you’ve got two systems. Then you’ve got to maintain those two systems.

What happens if you enter an invoice in one system and you enter an invoice in the other system? If you do that, what’s going to capture it? The data isn’t in the same database. So, cross-system duplicates are very common in environments where you’ve got multiple ERP systems.

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Same-System Duplicates

Now, let’s say you’ve got an integrated system all within one ERP. How do duplicate payments happen from that?

This is generally true for every system — from SAP to Oracle to PeopleSoft to JD Edwards, to old systems like Baan or even homegrown AS/400 systems. These are common across all of those systems. For SAP, it’s a little different, and I have a separate video just on SAP and duplicate payment controls.

Most ERP systems have basic controls that look at four data elements:
 1. Vendor number
 2. Invoice date
 3. Invoice number
 4. Invoice amount

If those four match, the system will say, “Hey, this is a duplicate payment.” Some systems have hard stops where you can’t process the invoice unless you change something. Others have soft stops where it warns you, and you can simply click “Yes” to continue.

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Data Entry Errors

Duplicate payments often happen because of data entry errors. For instance, if one user enters an invoice as “001” and another enters it as “1,” the ERP system won’t flag it — it sees them as different.

It could also be that the invoice date or amount is entered incorrectly. For example, if one invoice is entered as $100.01 and another as $100.00, it won’t be flagged as a duplicate. Even though you’d recognize it as a duplicate, the system won’t.

You can also run into issues with OCR tools, where invoices are scanned and entered automatically. If the OCR’s data entry standards don’t align with your manual data entry standards, discrepancies — and missed duplicates — can occur.

Another common cause is selecting the wrong vendor number. People are often in a rush and might pick the wrong vendor from a lookup list or mistype a memorized number.

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Duplicate Vendors

The heart of every ERP system assumes there’s only one vendor master file record per vendor. If you have duplicates in your vendor master, the system is not operating as designed.

If you enter one invoice under one vendor record, and the same invoice under another, it will get processed — not flagged. This is a very common source of duplicate payments.

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Interfaces

I’m seeing a growing trend here because companies are adding bolt-on tools to make invoice processing more efficient — but not always thinking about duplicate checks.

Examples include:
 • Vendor portals where suppliers upload their own invoices.
 • Third-party outsourcers processing invoices that are later loaded into your ERP.
 • APIs or custom integrations directly from vendors.

When these tools are built, IT is focused on functionality — can the transactions process? But duplicate checking is often overlooked.

For instance, an API might block duplicate uploads, but it might not prevent someone from entering the same invoice manually in the ERP. If both occur, you now have duplicates.

You need to make sure proper duplicate invoice controls exist across all interfaces and tools feeding your ERP.

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P-Cards and One-Cards

Many companies are now using P-cards or one-cards, not just for travel and expenses, but for small-dollar — and increasingly large-dollar — transactions. I’ve even seen payments of $100,000 made via P-card.

If an invoice is entered into your ERP and also paid via P-card, you might unknowingly pay it twice. P-card data doesn’t usually include invoice numbers or dates that match your ERP data, so it’s difficult to detect duplicates.

This mismatch between ERP and P-card data creates another common source of duplicate payments.

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Wire Transfers

This is more common than people think. Suppose an invoice is entered into AP, but someone makes a manual wire transfer to the vendor outside of the system.

When AP later processes the same invoice through its regular pay cycle, it pays it again. That’s not technically a duplicate invoice — it’s a duplicate payment — but it has the same financial impact.

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Closing Thoughts

There are many different ways duplicate invoices and payments can occur.

If any of these scenarios sound familiar, take a look at our AP Guru solution. It identifies duplicates across all these categories. We also offer a free proof of concept — we’ll load your data, identify duplicates, and give you a sample of the results to prove the value.

If you proceed with our service, we’ll provide the full list of duplicates and can even help you collect them if you lack the internal resources.

Thank you for your time today. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out at www.apimpact.com.