How do duplicate payments happen in a group?

Most often when the same supplier invoices more than one entity, or when an invoice arrives twice by different routes and is approved by two different people. Email approval makes both invisible, because there is no single record of what has been received, approved and paid. The pattern is a control gap rather than carelessness.

Why reconcile supplier statements?

Because it is the only routine that compares what the supplier thinks you owe against what your ledger says, which catches duplicates, missing invoices and misapplied credits in one pass. It also finds invoices you never received, which are usually the more expensive problem since they surface as a demand months later. Monthly reconciliation on the largest suppliers gets most of the benefit.

What should an approval workflow include?

Thresholds tied to amount, a named approver at each level, segregation between the person who approves and the person who pays, and a record of who approved what and when. It should also cover what happens when the approver is unavailable, since an undefined escalation path is where workflows quietly revert to email.

Should entity coding happen at capture or at payment?

At capture, always. Coding at payment means the cost lands with whichever entity's bank account was used, which is a cash decision rather than an accounting one. That is how intercompany balances and entity-level profitability both become unreliable, and correcting it afterwards requires knowing what the invoice was for, which is exactly the information that was available at capture.

Does AP automation replace the need for reconciliation?

No. Automated capture reduces manual entry and catches obvious duplicate invoice numbers, but it will not catch the same cost invoiced to two entities under different references, or a credit note the supplier issued and you never applied. The automation and the reconciliation address different failures, and a group with a shared supplier base needs both.

Agencies · 🇬🇧 United KingdomScenario

Accounts payable control across a multi-entity group

Duplicate payments across a group happen when the same supplier invoices more than one entity and approval runs by email, because no single record exists showing which entity paid what, and supplier statement reconciliation is the only routine that reliably finds them. This is an illustrative example of how Salt approaches accounts payable control, using a three-entity UK agency group as the profile.

Ask how we'd handle this

Scenario — an illustrative example of how Salt approaches this problem. Not a description of a specific client engagement.

The business shape it describes: UK agency group, 3 entities, high supplier volume.

Scenario covers: Accounts payable process, supplier statement reconciliation and bookkeeping across three entities
Jurisdiction: United Kingdom
Sector: Agencies

The setup

Take a UK agency group of three entities with a shared supplier base, where invoices arrive into several inboxes and are approved by reply.
Nobody can say reliably which entity has paid what, and supplier statements have not been reconciled in over a year.

What usually turns out to be wrong

Duplicate payments across entities, arising where the same supplier invoices more than one company in the group and each pays independently.
No approval threshold, so any amount can be authorised by anyone who happens to reply to the email.
Supplier statements unreconciled, which is the routine that would have caught both the duplicates and the missed invoices.
Entity coding decided at payment rather than at capture, so the cost lands wherever the payment was made from rather than where it belongs.

How this would be worked

Introduce a single AP inbox with automated invoice capture, so every invoice enters one queue rather than several mailboxes.
Define an approval workflow with thresholds, so authority is a rule rather than whoever answers first.
Reconcile supplier statements across all three entities, which is what surfaces both duplicates and invoices that were never received.
Code the entity at the point of capture rather than at payment, so the cost sits with the company that incurred it.
Set up a recurring supplier statement reconciliation, because a one-off exercise finds the current duplicates and prevents none of the next ones.

Why we'd be the right fit

A duplicate payment across a shared supplier base is only visible if you reconcile statements entity by entity and can say which entity should have carried the cost in the first place.
Finding the money is the easier half. Designing an approval workflow the agency's own people will keep using after we step back is the part that has to be right.

What the business would be able to do

The group would be able to see which entity owes what to which supplier, from one queue rather than three inboxes.
Approval would be traceable against a threshold, so authority is documented rather than inferred from an email thread.
Supplier statement reconciliation would run as a routine, which is what stops duplicates recurring rather than just finding the existing ones.

What we'd flag

Recovering a duplicate payment depends on the supplier agreeing it happened and being willing to refund or credit it, and older duplicates are harder to recover than recent ones. The process change is worth more than the recovery in almost every case.

Answers

Accounts payable control across a multi-entity group

Where this applies

Accounts PayableService BookkeepingService All services in United KingdomFRS 102 / UK GAAP More scenarios42 illustrative, labelled examples

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