Category: Software

Duplicate Payments – A Concern for your Organisation?

Jo

To err is human, even for humans who work in the accounts group. Sooner or later, someone is going to make a mistake paying an invoice, and it will cost you. That’s obvious: it’s just the law of averages. The question is, how often will it happen and what will the overall cost be to your company? Intuitively, you might think it’s minimal, but the reality is quite different. Industry estimates calculate that one in every thousand transactions is an overpayment. There are many different reasons this can occur, but the most frequent is duplicate payments – where, by accident or dishonest design, the same invoice is paid twice. One in a thousand may not seem like a lot, but it all adds up. And if you’re a business that relies on very large volumes of minor transactions – high numbers of low-margin payments – then you could be in a lot of trouble. Recovery audit software will highlight where this is happening and help you claim back the money paid, assuming you act quickly. An accounts payable audit shows you who still owes you money that, due to oversight or problems in your accounting systems, has never been collected.

The larger your company, the greater this problem is likely to be – and not just because it means a larger number of transactions to go wrong. When you are making and receiving a lot of payments, it gets harder and harder to pinpoint the incorrect ones. These could be due to genuine misunderstanding, or occasionally fraud. If a supplier is sending the same invoice every month, it gets easier to send in a repeat which slips under the radar: the source of many duplicate payments. Of course, the same thing can happen through forgetfulness or accident. Either way, you’ll end up overpaying unless someone recognises it, and in a busy accounts department there’s no way that someone will be able to remember and verify all of your payments personally. That’s why recovery audit software can be so useful, usually paying for itself the first time you use it. And problems with your accounts cut both ways. You may be overpaying other people, and your customers and others could be underpaying you. These payments can become mislaid in the system, with nothing in place to chase them up. An accounts payable audit seeks out the offenders and ensures that they settle their bills.

Please visit https://www.fiscaltec.com/

Accounts Payable Audit and Duplicate Payments Software – Allowing an overview of Complete Financial Histories…

Stuart

Accounts payable audit software and systems are almost essential to the running of any business today. This year we have heard story upon story about tax evasion, misspending, underhand expense claims, overpayment and underpayment. All of these stories have painted a sorry picture, and when big businesses have been revealed to be in the wrong great damage has been done to their reputation. At other times businesses who have mismanaged their finances have had to be bailed out by others or fork out large sums of money owed in compensation to those who have been taken advantage of. All in all, it’s a tricky time to be in business: the utmost transparency is required and best practice systems must be put firmly in place. Duplicate payments are one issue that should be totally avoided: if your business has paid for a service twice it will often be difficult to prove your point and succeed in getting reimbursed. Sometimes these scenarios are unavoidable, however, at which point it is a great idea to have recovery audit software in place: if mistakes are made you will be able to look through a comprehensive list of transactions and find out exactly what has gone awry. You will also be able to present the information such recovery systems find as evidence of honest mistakes and misjudgements.

Experienced accountants will attest the benefits of using computerised fiscal technologies. In some small businesses the use of computer reliant accountancy will mean that savings can be made on employing a full time accountant to the enterprise. Generally speaking though, accounts audit systems will assist professional accountants in keeping tabs on the ins and outs of larger companies. They will help staff do their job more quickly and provide them with an option of checking the accuracy of their work at any given step in the proceedings – before it’s too late. It’s hard to make a profit these days but it is easier to break even and employ the ultimate level of professionalism with regards to incoming and outgoing payments.

In sum, accountancy has become a better profession since the launch of recovery audit software. Moreover, running independent and freelance businesses has become much more manageable since the dawn of the accounts payable audit. It would be embarrassing as an independent freelancer to ask for a sum of money that had already been handed your way. Duplicate payments are a source of great awkwardness best avoided.

Please visit https://www.fiscaltec.com/

How does Bacs software help businesses?

Jo

Bacs software is a type of payment and documentation software which automates the payment and claiming of direct debits and direct credits across the entire financial sector. Any company receiving or paying direct debits or direct credits in the UK has to make sure that it has the capability to receive Bacs payments, in order to safely, securely and legally carry out these transactions. Bacs is a term often used to refer to the universal UK automated payments system. In actual fact, the word means the not-for-profit group, owned by 16 UK banks and building societies, which controls and regulates the payments systems.

Direct debit is used by approximately 75% of UK adults to fulfill phone bills or subscriptions, or to make donations to charity – and it’s far more common for each adult to hold multiple direct debits. Meanwhile, direct credit is used by companies to pay recurring wages or salaries, and by UK benefits providers to distribute the hundreds of different benefits involved in the UK system: housing benefit, job-seekers benefit, child benefit etc.

In actual fact, most households pay out multiple direct debits and many receive multiple direct credits. At the same time a company or charity of any size generally needs Bacs software in place to be able to make or receive Bacs payments. When the organization gets bigger, its accounts payable departments are generally flooded with multiple direct debit payments. This means that most companies above a medium size – and some small to medium enterprises – use automated Bacs payment software to know that their payments are protected, accurate and efficient.

Although some still work with manual processing, this can leave companies open to fraud or simple losses through inefficiency. When a company receives and makes payments globally, an additional layer of complication is added. A specialist automated payments solution will validate and verify bank account information at every phase of payment, and will have software accredited by the Bacs group in place. This accreditation is a labourious process which involves direct supervision and training. This means that if a properly accredited software provider is utilized, direct debit and direct credit payments are guaranteed to be safer and more effectual.

Companies often take to automated payment solutions because of their blend of cutting costs with wonderfully increased productivity. Payments can be most effectively handled by a dedicated software solution – and if companies choose an accredited Bacs software solution provider, a huge weight is taken off the manager’s back.Â

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Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Bacs payments are efficient and safe

Emma

bacs is a catch-all term that describes a number of different kinds of electronic payment. Bacs payments will often be a direct debit or credit. Previously bacs software was also used for payments over the internet via online banking and over the phone. However, since 2007 the Faster Payments Service (FPS) has surpassed these, since it is virtually instantaneous (whereas bacs takes three working days).

Bacs is generally still the default for many kinds of regular payments, such as pay cheques and utility bills. The process is highly secure, with many different layers of security built into it. Additionally, there is the peace of mind that you will receive a full refund in the unlikely case that you are a victim of fraud.

For businesses there are numerous benefits to adopting bacs, instead of working with more ‘traditional’ methods of paying employees and suppliers – such as cash and cheque. Security is obviously one of these. It is no longer necessary to keep large sums of money on the premises, thereby reducing risk as well as the insurance payments you would have to keep up to protect you from theft. Reliability is another; bacs payments leave your account on the arranged date and arrive in the payee’s account three working days later. (Should you need a faster transfer there are different options, such as FPS or CHAPS, which entails a fee.)

This also smooths accounting processes, since it makes for very predictable outgoings. You know exactly when and how much money will be leaving your account – and, if you are paid by bacs, you will have a good idea of when money will come in. Bacs can also be combined with many accounts packages, helping you to spend less time on your finances and get on with what really matters for your business.

Bacs software is supplied by different companies, each of which will need to meet strict criteria. As well as providing the necessary hardware and enabling you to make bacs payments, most should give some form of training to help you make the most of your new bacs capabilities – thus saving you time and money as well as decreasing the risk of fraud to your business. As fewer and fewer businesses still use cash and cheques for their main transactions, there are more and more benefits to be enjoyed by moving to a platform of electronic payments.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Bacs software to enhance your business’€™s cash flow

Stuart

When it comes to payday, your staff won’t be happy if their wages are delayed. Neither will your clients tolerate overdue payments or erroneous invoice receipts. To prevent all of these issues, use bacs software for your financial transactions to ensure your business does not dip into the red. Let’s contrast the situation between a business that does not use bacs payments, and a business that does. The business that does not use bacs pays all of its wages, salaries, suppliers, refunds, pensions, dividends, expenses and insurance settlements by cheque or cash. Each transaction requires the preparation, sorting and collating of cheques and invoices, and each of these has to conform with the relevant remittance advice. Correspondent administration costs are increased by the cost of stationary and postage costs.
What’s more, you don’t know specifically when the money will leave your account, and a buffer is always needed, so your money is not always working as hard as it could. There will always be a margin for human error when transactions are managed manually, not to mention the possibility for cheques to get lost or go missing.
Lastly, your employees and clients won’t be able to depend on a trustworthy and immediate payment by your business, thanks to the many factors that hold up transaction time. Their cash flow and yours will suffer, and customers may move away to a different provider.

On the other hand, a company that uses bacs gains an immediate lead on the competition. You immediately make savings as stationary costs are eradicated from the equation. All types of expenditure, from wages to insurance settlements, are provided for by bacs software. Time is saved, too, as bacs does all the banking work for you. Bacs will also authorise payments, so you no longer need worry about observing remittance advice – it’s already taken care of.

The greater control bacs software provides means you will know precisely when payments will leave your account. The outcome of this is that you’ll be able to make what is in your account work hard for you right up until payment. Bacs ensures your payments create only a single debit from your account on a particular date. The need to track individual payments is therefore removed. This increased efficiency puts the payer in the enviable position of being able to negotiate more favourable terms.

For your payees, organisations using bacs systems tend to pay earlier, and are perceived as more trustworthy. The payee will also save time handling banking of cheques and cash, as the money goes instantly into their account. These electronic payments appear as cleared funds immediately, which have the added bonus that payees earn interest sooner.

Using bacs software for all your business’s financial transactions imparts greater reliability to your operations, and a more fluid cashflow. There are correspondent benefits as mentioned above to bacs payments, such as negotiating potential and early interest. Bacs can really provide you with dependable solutions to financial transactions for both payer and payee.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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Accounts payable audit will save you big money

Stuart

An accounts payable audit is a way of trawling your accounts records and finding out where the mistakes have occurred in the past – and, as a result, where they are likely to crop up in the future. Needless to say, errors of any kind in your accounts are a mistake you can’t afford to make – especially at the moment, in times of economic uncertainty. One of the most common problems is duplicate payments – paying the same individual or organisation twice for one invoice. This could be down to human error, but it can also happen more deliberately. This is another purpose of recovery audit software: to prevent fraud and recoup money you have lost unnecessarily, whether through genuine mistake or through dishonest exploitation of the weaknesses in your system.

Estimates vary for the amount of money wasted by the average business on unnecessary payments, but it often comes out between 0.1 percent and 0.5 percent – that is, between one and 5 invoices per thousand. Needless to say, this can represent a significant proportion of turnover. An examination of three years’ worth of accounts for many organisations can reveal discrepancies that run into three figures. The problem is that the average invoice has so many data fields that it is very easy to enter data inaccurately. In fact, auditors have found that errors of this type occur in the accounts for every single business whose accounts they have examined.

Depending on the size of your business, accounts errors could be costing you hundreds or thousands of pounds every month, if not more. That means that recovery audit software could net you tens of thousands of pounds back in bad payments. Even if the figure is lower, it is likely to pay for itself the first time you ever use it, and continue to earn its keep in the months and years to come.

Such recovery audit software therefore promises a fantastic return on investment and allows some peace of mind from the problems that human error inevitably brings. Although it is probably impossible to eradicate duplicate payments altogether, an accounts payable audit will go a long way towards this goal. In an economic downturn or period of poor growth, every method of saving money should be investigated. If checking your accounts can find the money you would have saved by making redundancies, then this has got to be a preferable option.

Please visit http://www.fiscaltechnologies.com/ for further information about this topic.

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How bacs can improve processes in your business

Emma

It is a typical issue in most modern companies, however large and successful they are – keeping control over financial transactions can present real difficulties. In order to pass audits and ensure cost effectiveness, it is crucial that businesses can make payments securely and track the payments they collect.  It is often the case that bacs software is the best way to facilitate this.  Processing payments electronically with bacs, or bankers’ automated clearing services, can optimise the security and efficiency of your transactions and save you valuable time and money. Taking a few working days to clear, bacs payments are a highly effective way of keeping on top of your firm’s finances.

Bacs software solutions can be adapted to the needs of individual businesses, so they can improve the security and efficiency of each firm in the most appropriate way.  The systems cater for multiple divisions and operating procedures, which has the added bonus of giving finance officers the broad perspective that is very useful in assessing the company’s financial position and making strategic decisions.

The need to move data or information between applications has often proved a challenge for businesses, necessitating complex integration and highly skilled staff.  It should be a relief to the business world that this often difficult process is no longer necessary.  Essentially, bacs empowers organisations globally to transfer data between banks and customers.  Invented  in 1968 as the Inter-Bank Computer Bureau, the system has gained many adherents as it has developed.  Nowadays, the need for paper documents as part of the money transfer process seems largely outdated.  The benefits of this system go further than cost and time efficiency: phasing out  paper documents frees up space in the workplace , allowing for more staff or useful technology such as computers where filing cabinets might have been. With companies increasingly looking to improve their environmental credentials, limiting paper wastage is a great added bonus of digitising payment processes.

Clearly, bacs software exists to make our lives easier, and it just does not make sense not to take advantage of it. The savings in terms of time, money and space that can be made by introducing bacs to your workplace are so significant that it is surely worth the time that it takes retraining your staff to adapt to the change. Compared with regular  payments, bacs payments are quicker, smoother and more hassle free than anything that has been used in the past.

Please visit http://www.bottomline.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

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