BACKGROUND

BSUH is the regional teaching hospital and provides acute services to the local population and more specialist services across Sussex and the South East. Having recently gained a clean bill of health itself by way of the Healthcare Commission’s recent “Excellent” award – the Trust was keen to ensure that all areas of its spending was at its most effective.  BSUH was also recognised as having made significant improvements in its financial management over the last two years.

TAKING CONTROL

The Creditor’s team realised that although good controls were in place together with a solid accounting and purchase order processing system they were still exposed to overpayments.

Based on current research it is estimated that in the UK 1 in 2000 invoices is paid twice. As BSUH process over 100,000 invoices annually, their existing systems simply couldn’t provide the extra in-depth analysis to highlight where the mistakes were happening on a weekly basis.  In the past, BSUH had hired recovery auditors to help them address these problems however this meant a disruption to the department and as it was retrospective they were charged significant fees for recovery. They now wanted to take control and bring this operation in-house and stop duplicates from happening at source.

SOLUTION
BSUH needed an easy to use system that could be utilised quickly before a payment run or at the very least managed monthly. It had to save time and record why the duplicates & errors were being made. FISCAL provided Duplicate Payment Finder™ (DPF) software which is part of its AP Forensics® suite of tools.  Using world class search algorithms, sophisticated pattern recognition & credit matching routines, the software is very quickly able to identify possible duplicate payments and provide management reporting to stop future errors from happening.

RESULTS
Within an hour of installing the software, BSUH were able to immediately realise the benefits of the software.  Inside a month of use the BSUH had saved several times the cost of the software through an historic audit and over 5 months prevented more than £50,000 from being paid twice.  This solution has allowed them to strengthen internal controls with little additional resources. Also it created process efficiencies, whilst protecting working capital and supporting compliance.

CONCLUSION
BSUH is representative of many large organisations who process over 50,000 invoices per year. They understand that even the best accounting systems and internal procedures won’t necessarily prevent all duplicate payments.  But, through regularly using specialist accounts payable auditing software such as Duplicate Payment Finder, they can catch these errors early and stop them costing the organisation large amounts of money & time. 

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