What is an AP Audit
Video: What Is an Accounts Payable Audit? Explained by AP Impact
An Accounts Payable Audit helps organizations identify and recover funds lost through duplicate payments, missed credits, and other AP process breakdowns. In this video, AP Impact’s Karl Andersson walks through the end-to-end audit process — from data harvesting and supplier reconciliation to claim validation and recovery — and explains why contingency-based audits deliver guaranteed ROI.
A great watch for CFOs, controllers, and AP managers looking to improve visibility and recover lost value from their payables process.
Transcript
What Is an Accounts Payable Audit?
Presented by Karl Andersson, AP Impact
Hi, this is Karl Andersson from AP Impact. Today, we’re going to talk about what an Accounts Payable Audit really is.
To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of the term “Accounts Payable Audit.” However, it’s the term that’s most widely recognized in the marketplace for these types of services.
A better way to describe it might be this:
“The recovery of funds you didn’t know you lost throughout your purchase-to-payment process.”
That’s really the heart of what we’re doing — uncovering dollars that have slipped through the cracks and recovering them through a structured audit process.
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At Its Core: A Massive Reconciliation
An Accounts Payable Audit is essentially a comprehensive reconciliation.
We reconcile your vendor records against your internal records, looking for differences and discrepancies.
What’s unique about this process is that we’re finding things that exist on your suppliers’ records but not in your own — the transactions or credits your systems never captured. Through this reconciliation, we highlight those mismatches so they can be investigated and recovered.
To accomplish this, we perform well over a thousand reconciliations — sometimes even multiple per vendor — depending on data complexity and transaction volume.
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Technology That Powers the Audit
To manage this scale efficiently, we’ve developed our own technology platform called AP.Guru.
This tool allows us to:
- Ingest supplier statement data
- Match it against your internal AP and vendor records
- Identify discrepancies quickly and accurately
In short, AP.Guru helps us find recoveries that don’t exist in your current systems or processes — ensuring nothing is missed.
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The Audit Process: Step-by-Step
An Accounts Payable Audit typically takes about 12 weeks from start to finish. It unfolds in several key phases:
1. Data Harvesting & Analysis
We begin by gathering and analyzing your accounts payable data. Your data is loaded into AP.Guru, where we identify:
- Duplicate payments
- Payments to incorrect or duplicate vendors
- Trends in your AP process that indicate risk
From this analysis, we create a target vendor list — the suppliers most likely to have recovery opportunities.
2. Vendor Selection & Approval
We provide you with the list of vendors we recommend reconciling, and you review and approve it. We’ll also share the communications templates we’ll send to suppliers, so you have full visibility into the outreach process.
3. Supplier Communication & Claim Identification
Once approved, our team manages all outreach and correspondence with your suppliers. We identify potential claims, confirm their validity, and document the root cause of each issue — ensuring credits are legitimate and recoverable.
All claim information is tracked in our client portal, where you can monitor real-time progress and review every claim we’ve processed.
4. Final Reporting & Insights
At the conclusion of the audit, we deliver a comprehensive wrap-up report that:
- Summarizes all recoveries identified and validated
- Explains the root causes of losses uncovered
- Recommends process improvements to prevent future occurrences
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Common Types of Recoveries
No two audits are exactly alike, but we consistently find similar recovery types across organizations. These often include:
- Returned products or merchandise
- Missed rebates or supplier credits
- Duplicate payments
- Overpayments
- Tax discrepancies or misapplications
Each recovery is documented with its root cause in our portal, giving your team insight into trends and opportunities to strengthen internal controls.
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Contingency-Based Fee Structure
One of the best aspects of an Accounts Payable Audit is its risk-free, contingency-based model.
We’re compensated only when we recover funds for you. If we don’t recover anything, you owe nothing.
The good news? We’ve recovered funds for every single client we’ve worked with.
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Learn More
If you’d like to learn more about AP Impact and how we help organizations identify and recover lost funds, please visit us at www.apimpact.com.
Thank you for your time.