Agencies · 🇬🇧 United Kingdom
Paying some suppliers twice and others not at all
An agency group approving invoices by email across three entities had no reliable record of what had been paid.
UK agency group, 3 entities, high supplier volume. Client identity withheld — we publish names only with written permission, so this engagement is described by its shape rather than by who it was.
3
Entities on one AP process
£11k
Duplicate payments identified
Approval
Workflow introduced
The situation
- Supplier invoices arrived by email to several inboxes and were approved by reply.
- With three entities and shared suppliers, nobody could reliably say which entity had paid what.
What we found
- Duplicate payments across entities where the same supplier invoiced more than one.
- No approval threshold — anyone could authorise any amount by email.
- Supplier statements had not been reconciled in over a year.
What we did
- Introduced a single AP inbox with automated capture and a defined approval workflow with thresholds.
- Reconciled supplier statements across all three entities and identified duplicates.
- Established entity-level coding at the point of capture rather than at payment.
The outcome
- Around £11,000 of duplicate payments were identified and recovered from suppliers.
- Approval is now traceable, and month-end AP reconciliation takes hours rather than days.
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