Purchase-to-pay is an absolute must-have control area. Most companies start by controlling this area and ignore the rest, which is not good either, but if you aren’t controlling purchasing with data analytics, you know you better remedy the situation quickly!
Within the purchasing process are all the classic very well known controls concerning fictitious suppliers, purchase orders that avoid approbation limits, that have prices that are way above market values, invoices that don’t have purchase orders or that are duplicated and payments that are too high, don’t have invoices, made too early or made to the wrong third-party, etc.
There may be many reasons why a supplier appears more than once in your database, and some of these reasons might be legitimate. So why would someone enter the same supplier in your database, multiple times, but with a different supplier number? One reason, could be to avoid controls around the supplier ageing balance.Â