7 Signs Your Company Needs an AP Recovery Audit

1. ERP changes or mergers

If you recently changed ERPs, merged entities, or consolidated plants, your AP data and vendor masters likely went through messy transitions.​

• During these periods, duplicate vendors, mis‑coded suppliers, and orphaned credits are common.

2. High invoice volume with limited AP headcount

When a small AP team processes thousands of invoices per month, controls often become checklists, not true reviews.​

• Duplicate payments, wrong rates, and missed discounts slip through under volume pressure.

3. Frequent vendor disputes

If you often have back‑and‑forth with suppliers about balances, credits, or pricing, it is a sign your processes and data are not aligned.​

• An independent recovery audit can quantify the problem and show where to strengthen controls.

4. Complex discounts and rebates

Tiered pricing, rebates, and marketing funds are valuable—when tracked correctly. In practice, they are often under‑claimed.​

• Reconstructing volumes and terms historically can recover unclaimed money and improve future tracking.

5. Multi‑plant or multi‑state operations

Spread operations increase risk of inconsistent coding and local workarounds.​

• AP recovery across all plants/sites often reveals very different practices producing similar errors.

6. Limited internal audit capacity

Internal audit teams are busy with SOX, IT, and core risk areas; deep AP data mining rarely gets priority.​

• A specialist recovery audit supplements, rather than replaces, internal audit with focused tools and methods.

7. No AP audit in the last 3–5 years

If you have not run an AP recovery or supplier‑statement audit recently, there is almost certainly recoverable value in your historical data.​

A structured AP recovery audit turns these soft signals into hard numbers, typically recovering both cash and clear process improvements.