What is an accounts payable audit and what does it deliver?

An accounts payable audit, also called a recovery audit, is an independent review of your historical payment data with one goal: finding money your organisation paid in error and actually getting it back. Unlike a financial statement audit, the question is not whether the annual accounts are right, but whether every euro that left the organisation was really owed.

What is reviewed?

The audit typically analyses three to five years of payment history, purchase invoices, vendor master data and, where relevant, contracts. The main claim types:

• Duplicate payments: the same invoice paid twice.
• Overpayments: paid above the contract price, missed discounts, surcharges charged twice.
• Credit notes, prepayments and deposits that were never offset.
• Credit balances with suppliers, uncovered through statement of account reconciliation.
• Incorrectly processed VAT, such as reverse-charge VAT that was paid anyway or recoverable foreign VAT.

What does the process look like?

A professional audit is set up so that the burden on your team is minimal. The process in five steps: (1) intake and confidentiality agreements, (2) a one-off data delivery, in practice about four hours of work for your IT or finance team, (3) data analysis by the auditor using detection algorithms, (4) review of the claims found, where you approve each claim before any supplier is contacted, and (5) recovery and reporting. Expect a lead time of a few months, with at most one hour every two weeks for your team.

What does it deliver?

The result has two parts. First, the money recovered: this varies widely per organisation and depends on invoice volume, number of entities, system history and the quality of existing controls. Second, and just as valuable: the management report. Every error found and every correction entry points to a weak spot in the purchase-to-pay process. A good audit ends with concrete recommendations per root cause, so the same losses do not keep recurring.

What does it cost?

Most recovery audits work on a no cure, no pay basis: the auditor receives a percentage of the money actually recovered and approved by you. If the audit finds nothing, you pay nothing. That makes the financial risk of an audit effectively zero for your organisation, while any proceeds go straight to your bottom line.