How Much Money is Your Business Throwing Away in Duplicate Invoice Payments?

If your small or midsize business is like most, you could be throwing away as much as $12,000 a month – money that could be spent on staffing, resources, innovation or any number of impactful investments. Duplicate payments are a common and preventable error plaguing AP processes today.

How can your company save on invoice management? Get the full report to find out

SAP Concur studied invoice data from September 2015 through August 2016 to explore the volume and value of duplicate invoices Concur Invoice is catching for our SMB customers (businesses that employ up to 1,000 people). Nearly $20 billion spread across more than 2.8 million invoices were processed by Sap Concur on behalf of these customers in the past year.

According to Concur Invoice data, a typical SMB* processes approximately 450 invoices in a busy month, and experiences an invoice duplication rate of 1.29%, or about six duplicate invoices monthly.

The average value of a duplicate invoice received is $2,034. That amounts to a total potential outlay of $12,000 per month if each duplicate invoice were to be paid in error.

“SAP Concur data shows us that duplicate invoicing is a big problem in the SMB market, likely costing businesses not just in terms of overpayment but in time spent to rectify the overpayment,” said Christal Bemont, SVP & GM (SMB), SAP Concur. “For businesses focused on growth and profitability, time and money spent on making and correcting duplicate payments runs completely counter to their goals.”

The Concur Invoice study also found that: 

• For SMB customers that processed invoices only in the amounts of $50,000 and less, a subset of the total population studied, SAP Concur prevented payment of nearly $24 million in duplicate invoices.
   
• July represents the peak month of the year in terms of the amount of invoices processed, seeing more than $2.5 billion and 275,000 invoices.
   
• In July 2016, across the total population of SMB customers studied (no limit on invoice amounts), Concur Invoice saw the largest number of duplicate invoices, with a median value of $530 and average value of $9,066 per invoice.
   
• SAP Concur flagged 1.29% of invoices as duplicates for SMB customers during a one-year timeframe.

How Can Duplicate Invoices Be Prevented?

Concur Invoice can help eliminate this duplicate invoice issue. In addition to serving as a platform for managing invoicing and payments, Concur Invoice tracks and matches invoice details to identify duplication. As with Sap Concur’s other products, Invoice allows customers to configure alerts or automatically halt on processing when duplicate invoices are identified, saving businesses not only a lot of financial headaches, but also a bundle of operating dollars.

Learn the true costs of paper-based invoicing, and potentially save thousands of operating dollars. Download the report here.

*SMB companies receiving and processing invoices in the amounts of $50,000 or less.