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NHS Trusts Deliver Cost Efficiency Savings Using Leading Accounts Payable Audit Software
AP Forensics® Contributes to Efficiency Gains in Over 25 NHS Trusts

Reading, UK – 29 March 2010: AP Forensics®, world-class accounts payable audit software from FISCAL Technologies, is now used by more than 25 NHS trusts, primary care trusts and acute trusts to help them recover money lost to duplicate payments, fraudulent activity and other Accounts Payable errors.

AP Forensics® is fast growing in popularity with public sector organisations and businesses alike, thanks to its ability to rapidly deliver simple cost savings, often  tens of thousands of pounds. These cost efficiencies are contributing to the NHS’s tough cost-saving and efficiency targets and are helping NHS trusts to put front line care first.

Indeed, in last week’s budget the Chancellor announced that the government is on track to achieve its £11bn efficiency savings target by 2012-13. The Department of Health and the NHS will deliver £4.35bn of savings as their departmental contribution towards the £11bn. A significant percentage will be delivered through better procurement, savings in management and back office costs and more efficient use of the hospital estate.

Brighton & Sussex University Hospital, a regional teaching hospital providing acute services to a large local population and more specialist services across Sussex and the South East, has used AP Forensics’ Duplicate Payment module for some time. Payments Manager, Jo Gander was aware that despite good controls and a solid accounting and purchase order processing system, with over 100,000 invoices coming through Accounts Payable, the hospital was still exposed to overpayments.

She says: “We were aware that the manual processing of some elements of the Accounts Payable function, coupled with inconsistent invoice presentation by certain suppliers, was allowing errors to creep into the AP system. Although most of these were eventually discovered and retrieved, the whole process was protracted and very time consuming. At first I was a little unsure about FISCAL’s claim that we would discover duplicates in a very short space of time, but I have to say that on the first run we found duplicates and errors that would never have been highlighted by our current checks.”

David Griffiths concludes: “BSUH is representative of many NHS organisations who process over 20,000 invoices per year. However, they understood that through regularly using specialist accounts payable auditing software such as AP Forensics®, they can catch duplicate payments and other invoicing errors early and stop them costing the organisation large amounts of money and time. We’re also delighted to welcome Imperial College Healthcare and Birmingham Children’s Hospital as recent AP Forensics® customers.”

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About FISCAL Technologies

FISCAL Technologies Ltd, founded in 2002, provides world-class accounts payable audit software for corporations and government agencies to detect duplicate payments, fraud, invoicing errors and compliance issues. Organisations trust these solutions to meet their needs for cost reduction and increased control and protection of their working capital.

FISCAL’s AP Forensics® suite consists of three core modules to analyse invoices,
supplier accounts and VAT line items. Using industry-leading algorithms and pattern-matching technology, these modules have been designed specifically for Accounts Payable staff to easily run on a weekly or constant monitoring basis. They can work alongside any accounting system and have been used to scan hundreds of millions of transactions across the globe. For more information, please visit www.fiscaltec.co.uk or www.fiscaltec.com.

About AP Forensics®

AP Forensics works by analysing accounts payable transactions, processes, people and suppliers to avoid accidental duplicate payments, invoicing errors, compliance issues and supplier fraud. Most accounting systems are designed to carry out only basic checks, leaving a need for additional specialist software like AP Forensics to prevent organisations losing sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.