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Duplicate invoice example for organizations

we talk a lot about duplicate payments but not so much about duplicate invoices this is unfortunate as one of the unsavory outcomes of receiving more than one copy of an invoice is a duplicate payment stick around until the end when we talk about one questionable invoice practice that more than a few suppliers are using to trick you into making a duplicate payment once you know what it is you'll be able to protect against it hey guys I'm Eric Schaefer founder of apnow your One-Stop shop for Cutting Edge business intelligence if you work in manage you'll have responsibility for the accounts payable and or payment function so what is this problem that I'm talking about duplicate copies of invoices apnow now now estimates that 25 of all invoices received by companies are duplicates and they're duplicates of invoices that are not past due they're just multiple copies of the same invoice either emailed to several different people or email to and mail put through the snail mail okay this has become a huge problem because it creates a lot of extra work for the accounts payable team non-value Ad work by the way that virtually no company is adding staff to handle and occasionally those invoices slip through those second copy slip through and a duplicate payment is made and as you know duplicate payments are rarely returned but I'm not going to go down that that road just now okay so what can you do there are steps that you can take and I'm going to go through them um they're they're pretty easy number one encourage your suppliers to email invoices and email invoices only this eliminates the snail mail it gets that paper out and it will eliminate some of the duplicate copies of your invoices not all of them because you're still going to have the folks who email it to several different uh places and of course when you encourage your folks to email invoices you're going to give them an email address a unique unique in email address that takes only invoices is not used for anything else okay so encourage emailed invoices only big emphasis on only and there are some other benefits for that but uh you know I'm not going to go off on a tangent or at least I'm going to try not to step number two weed out the duplicates as early as possible in you in the process and the reason for this is the earlier that you weed them out the less time you waste uh processing them because the last thing you want to do is go through all your different steps of processing them and then at the last minute realize oh this is a duplicate and then you have to throw it out better than making the payment definitely but a lot of wasted effort for no added value other than you didn't make the um the duplicate payment okay next step it's pretty simple ask them to stop once you've figured out who these people are who are sending multiple copies of invoices you can just ask them to stop you can either call up or you can send an email requesting only one copy of the invoice be paid now of course if it's after the due date the vendor is within their rights to send a second copy of the invoice but that's not what we're talking about we're talking about organizations that pay um on time through the normal course of business getting three copies of the same invoice before the uh due date okay so ask them to stop a little extra effort but it will pay off next step after you've asked them to stop and they keep doing this identify the repeat offenders okay and you want to identify these repeat offenders because you're going to have to give them some extra special attention to make sure that you don't double pay so identify these re repeat offenders and um I'll tell you what to do with them a little bit later you also want to identify and this can be a real problem those sneaky suppliers who send the second copy of that invoice not in the beginning when they send it to four different people but either on the due date or right before the due date and they send the second copy I believe many of them with the hope that you'll think it's a rush you'll think you've missed the invoice and you'll make a second payment okay now sometimes if you've talked to them they'll say well it's just a reminder and you know my instinct is to say well don't remind me unless I haven't paid you know don't help me because your help isn't really help you have to be a little bit more polite than that okay but you want to identify these guys and you really want to keep a close eye on them uh because you may make a duplicate payment now before we move on I just want to share with you that we take a big accounts payable and payment issues on this channel on every Tuesday and Thursday and occasionally on Saturdays where we have a little Wordle front okay um our next step is um once you've identified your repeat offenders be they just repeat offenders or these these sneaky guys sending them at the last minute you want to have another conversation with them and I call it threaten but you you know you probably be a little bit more polite than me to put them on the ACT list I call the act list the always check thoroughly list this is a list that of vendors who you're going to double check every single one of their invoices before you make a payment to make sure that you don't uh duplicate pay it and the end result of this you might share with them is that the payment will be delayed because you're you're having to do this double checking um now you can say it nicely to them but at the end of the day you don't want to make a duplicate payment and if if you need to do this double checking you may end up delaying their payment and that is not what they want because after all at the end of the day well yeah it would be nice if you pay them twice really what they're trying to do most of them is just get paid and so so the best way in this case to get paid is not to send multiple copies of the same invoice okay um so now after you've done all this you've gone through all your steps that I've suggested maybe a few of your own that you've come up with and if you have some extra tactics that might work feel free to share it in the comments below so that we can all benefit from this and you've got your list now you're not getting so many duplicate copies of invoices and you can rest on your laurels right wrong because these duplicate invoices duplicate invoices I like to say I like weeds no matter how much you work on them you pull them you you try and train them to do the right thing no matter what you do you can never get rid of them completely uh companies that send them will either maybe they hired a new a new person and that person comes in and they think oh this is a great idea um or um somebody comes up with this idea or a company that wasn't sending duplicating voices now starts doing it so the problem never goes away you just have to stay on top of it just like weeds um to try and make sure that you keep it under control because when you go and you ask a company to stop sending duplicate copies of invoices to you and even when you threaten them and you say hey we're gonna put you on the ACT list and this is going to ultimately end up slowing down payments if it is their policy and their procedure to send these duplicate invoices in all likelihood they are not going to make this one change just to accommodate you uh for your uh special requirements so you got to stay on top of it so repeat go back you know um encourage the emailed invoices talk to them identify the offenders and keep at it now maybe someday we'll get to the point where this isn't an issue but I don't see it in the next few years now as you can tell from the details involved in this one small part of account the accounts payable process there are lots of practices that you should be using um to run a best practice operation that's why AP now is devoting the month of March to best practices and we'll be releasing a new video each day that we that focuses on some best practice now before you get too impressed some of these are going to be short okay well to be honest most of them are going to be short in fact they're less than a minute because they'll be what's called a YouTube short and they must be under a minute to to qualify for that but by the end of the month we'll have 31 days eight long of videos and 23 short tips we're going to put them all on a playlist both the long ones and the short ones which you can watch right now using the link that will appear momentarily on your YouTube screen and is in the show notes below as always we appreciate your thumbs up your comments your subscribes and your shares good luck