Impact of Alteryx on mitigating the risk of Duplicate Payments
What are Duplicate Payments?
Duplicate Payments are additional payments made to a vendor/supplier that have already been paid. These anomalies usually occur owing to flaws in an organization’s accounts payable (AP) process that do not detect the presence of prior payments.
For Example, if a “Company ABC” procured a “Material A” worth 2 crores from “Vendor X”, a duplicate payment will mean that the AP department of “Company ABC” pays “Vendor X” twice for a single transaction losing out on 2 crores worth of money.
Duplicate Payments can add up to substantial losses if left undetected. In addition, companies spend significant amount of time trying to identify such payments which could have been used in more productive things otherwise.
Causes of Duplicate Payments:
There might be several reasons for duplicate payments ranging from manual errors to complex internal business processes. Some of the causes include
· Discrepancies in Vendor Master File
· Data Entry Errors
· Pricing Errors (In case of International Vendors)
· Payments sent via multiple channels.
· Internal changes made to software.
It can be time consuming and difficult for a business to detect a duplicate payment before the payment is processed, as duplicates aren’t by definition exact replicas of one another. For example, duplicate invoices might have different users posting them, different dates or even different invoice numbers. This might occur when vendors send both an electronic and paper invoices, or if they re-send the same invoice after not having been paid by the agreed-upon date.
A thorough audit of Accounts Payable (AP) department is required to mitigate such requests. This can be done internally but could prove expensive and inefficient.
How can Alteryx Help?
An analyst can create an automated workflow in Alteryx with different rules such that, Alteryx can directly source data from the database (SAP, Oracle etc), apply complex logics, and output the results to the corresponding stake holders without any manual intervention required from the AP department’s end, enabling them to focus on solving more complex problem.
Execution Methodology:
Sourcing Data: If we consider our ERP to be SAP, analysts normally spend time downloading data from tables like ACDOCA or FBL1N. Due to the high transaction size of these tables, it will prove to be a herculean task to download the data.
Alteryx can help you directly connect to SAP HANA, so that you don’t have to manually download the data at any point. Alteryx can source data on different filter criteria from these tables.
Rule Creation: Post getting our data in Alteryx, we can create multiple rules owing to the wide variety of functionalities Alteryx can offer. The rules/combinations could be as follows
· Rule 1: Same (User, Vendor, Posting Date, Document Type, Amount)
· Rule 2: Same (User, Document Type, Vendor, Date, Amount) Different Document Numbers
· Rule 3: Same (Vendor, Amount, Document Type, Account Number)
This level of detail will help us cover a wider ground helping us better mitigate the risk of Duplicate Payments.
Output the Results: We can set the results in such a way that, once all the complex analysis is done, Alteryx will automatically mail these documents to stakeholders.
