Avoid Duplicate Payment Errors by Using a Recurring Items List

One costly mistake that many organizations incur are duplicate payments of invoices. In many cases this occurs for regularly recurring expense items such as rent, utilities, internet service, dues and subscriptions. If there is no file for tracking payment of these commonly recurring items, there is an increased risk that these items may be paid in duplicate, paid late or overpaid. Amounts for these recurring bills should be checked against a payment file to verify the amounts are within normal limits. A spreadsheet of commonly recurring payments can be setup to facilitate this and as vendor invoices are recevied they should be matched to the file to verify that payment has not already been issued and that the amount is within a tolerable range. There is also an opportunity to create additional efficiency here by leveraging the built-in functionality of many accounting packages to create recurring transactions such as a monthly purchase order for rent or subscription services.

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