Five Reasons Why a Recovery Audit Should Be at the Top of Your To-Do List

Be Proactive, Effective, and Return Profits.

1) Time is Money

While projects, initiatives, and implementations are getting postponed, a recovery audit shouldn’t. It can identify errors in supplier invoices while ensuring controls are working or identify where they may not be working as designed due to the work-from-home conditions. Recovery audits can be performed with a team of specialized professionals with little investment on the client side. 

2) Increase Profitability

Every bit of profit counts right now. A recovery audit brings surprising returns while helping your operations identify every potential opportunity for gains while reducing risks of lost profits. Find ‘hidden treasure’ in your accounts and make sure nothing is left behind. 

We refer to funds left at the supplier level as ‘hidden treasure’ because that is essentially what we’re looking at: credits and profits that are buried but worth unearthing. These funds may have been moved to suspended accounts, paid under different vendor ID’s, or could be in the form of rebates and discounts taken. 

Letting lost profits go to waste means letting go of resources that could support your current operations, your employees, and your future business. A recovery audit could make all the difference for your team. Given too much time, these lost profits pile up and worse yet, If they’re left to age, lost profits can be written off or lost altogether. That’s one great reason to get started sooner than later.

3) Stop Financial Leakage

A rotating staff can lead to disconnects in processes and procedures, leading to lost profits. A recovery audit gives you the insights you need to ensure that changes are being implemented properly without costing you unnecessary losses.

While Team A comes in on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, their counterparts in the office on Tuesday and Thursday can easily miss small details, dates, and deadlines or team B pays an invoice previously paid by Team A. If there is no time to adjust workflows in order to enforce traditional proper procedures, your company could be experiencing leaks in those controls that add up to significant lost profits. 

4) Validate and Verify

Supply chain and operational disruptions could easily be leading to lost profits. Many companies have had to source a new supplier at a moment’s notice to keep production in place. Though it was sometimes necessary this year, without time to follow normal protocol, procedure, and controls; this last-minute sourcing increases the probability of an increase in errors or improper pricing and related overpriced invoicing.

A recovery audit is an effective method for validating and verifying your supplier data without placing added strain on your internal resources.

5) Changes Within 

Some believe that remote work’s rise in popularity could be a permanent change in workforce culture. This could potentially lead to decentralization of industry, the scale of which no one can anticipate. Could normalizing remote teams and virtual partnerships also increase your level of outsourcing? How extensively will that affect your accounts payable?

When your vendor relationships, locations, and supply chains have changed, your company can absolutely benefit from a recovery audit. 

What  to Look for in a Recovery Audit

Throughout the past 25+ years we’ve been in business, we’ve determined the key characteristics that set apart a great recovery audit from an ineffective one. Our AP Recovery analysts implement each of these components in our own process to ensure you’re seeing max returns in addition to the invaluable insights your organization needs to move forward. 

Before your next recovery audit, look for the following characteristics in your chosen firm:

A Person-to-Person Approach 

The common practice of requesting a statement through letter or email is inefficient more than 75% of the time. That’s the reason our analysts pick up the phone and have live discussions with your suppliers. We’ve found that real people get real results. A recovery auditing team must understand the different cultures, terminology, and nuances of a diverse supplier base to truly be effective. We don’t just speak your language, we speak your suppliers’ languages, too. (Our multilingual analysts speak 12 languages and counting!) 

Before the audit, make sure the team goes the extra mile to speak to real people. 

Personalized Responses to Your Organization

Our own approach to recovery audits is simple. It’s designed for you with your goals in mind. Your organization should always feel prioritized during a recovery audit with open lines of communication between your team and the recovery auditing firm. Because we work with over 160 of the Fortune 1000 we know how important this is. It’s not just big business, it’s your business. 

Look for trusted professionals that take time to get to know you and your operations.

Accurate, Confirmed Claims You Can Count On

Claims are an essential piece of your organization’s recovery audit. Avoid working with firms that put the burden on you and your team to sort through legitimate and illegitimate claims. To save time and resources, our own AP Recovery analysts identify a claim and then work with your supplier to bring you claims that you can count on. We get the supplier to sign off on refunds and credits. Refunds are then processed, and credits are sent to our web portal so our clients can easily track and apply credits against future payments. All the invoices and claims from the current review can be viewed through the portal real time so you can manage the audit right at your desk, wherever that may be.

Research how good the firm’s claims are and what kind of stress/burden that will put on your team. Work with a company with a validated and streamlined claims processing system.

Powerful Analytics, AI Powered by Seasoned Professionals

Technology along with human discovery, common sense and curiosity ensure better results than anyone thought possible. After live communication to suppliers, our own team continues to dive deep using the best AI technology developed from and for our recovery audits. The tool we’ve created, Knowledge Exchange, allows us to look across all your suppliers and transactions, mapping and recording application habits. 

Knowledge Exchange isn’t just a database and audit workflow tool. Built into its core is flexibility, it gives us a single view into your system(s) allowing us to uniquely analyze, compare, identify, research, communicate and recover. 

Ensure your recovery audit delivers all the insights you need to improve operations with responsive tools, cutting-edge technology, and seasoned professionals to make the results truly powerful. 

Dynamic Reporting Tools

There’s so much invaluable information that comes from a recovery audit, but it’s hard to put it to use without the right presentations. 

After an audit, you are going to want all the insights about your audit, your claims, and your AP data at your fingertips. That’s why we developed our reporting tools to provide you the flexibility to customize the reports when and how you want them. Whether an executive-level report is required or you want to drill down into the weeds, audit visibility is available by year, quarter, month, business unit, location, type, or root cause…simple to use with powerful results.

Look for customizable reporting that easily tells you what happened, when it happened and why it happened.