Page 5 - Getting a Handle on Unmanaged Spend - SIB Whitepaper

Standard Internal Audits
Capturing spend via GL review is a smart, but often very inaccurate exercise. Services get categorized differently, miscategorized, or placed
under a “general” category that won’t show up on a GL review especially among larger companies that have locations scattered across the country. Issues like these can keep you from ever really knowing what you’re spending on something like waste removal, for instance.
Full-blown reviews that capture every last level of detail from every division also take time, energy, and expertise that many accounting departments just don’t have. Maintaining day-to-day operations keeps them too busy to make the effort to capture spend at this level of detail.
AP recovery reviews also tend to focus on objectives that can give the illusion of saving money while in actuality only recover a small portion of expenses. For instance, an AP review will help you uncover whether a certain invoice was overpaid, or perhaps paid twice, but it will never help you determine whether you were overcharged in the first place.
In other words, an AP recovery review helps you uncover errors that you made, not necessarily mistakes that your vendor may have made.
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Getting a Handle on Unmanaged Spend | © 2016 SIB Fixed Cost Reduction