Accounts payable recovery audit without the contingency firm.

An accounts payable recovery audit reviews your payment history against vendor contracts, rate sheets, and invoice data to find overpayments — duplicates, missed discounts, unclaimed credits — and recover the money. Traditional firms run one retrospectively, once a year; we run it continuously, before payment.

The recurring six: duplicate payments, missed early-payment discounts, unclaimed credit memos, contract and pricing errors, sales and use tax paid in error, and pass-through charges never billed on. Most AP organizations carry all six; the question is whether anyone is looking.

The triggers we see most: after a merger or acquisition, after an ERP migration, after AP staff turnover, and after rapid vendor-base growth. Anything that breaks the link between the person who knew the rules and the invoices now arriving is a trigger.

Recovery audit software applies generic rules and asks your team to operate another system. A recovery audit firm sweeps last year’s payments and leaves. The third option is the one we build: your specific vendor rules encoded into a continuous pre-payment check inside the AP flow you already run — a review queue, not a new tool.

Contingency firms typically charge a percentage of what they recover — industry-cited ranges run 10–40% — plus the leaks reopen after they leave. Our two-week audit is a fixed fee, credited toward the build if you continue, with a payback estimate up front.

Traditional guidance says annually or every other year — which means every leak runs for months before anyone looks. That cadence is an artifact of manual auditing. When the checks run continuously, the answer to “how often” is “every week, before the money leaves.”

Recovery audits examine past payments for potential overcharges. We can also build recurring checks into your AP workflow, with coverage, fees, and review requirements agreed before the build.

Software ships with generic rules and asks your team to adopt a new system. We encode your exceptions — contract rates, surcharge tables, unit-of-measure quirks — inside the flow you already run. Your team sees a review queue, not a new tool.

Read access to the AP inbox or invoice feed, your vendor contracts and rate sheets, and two hours a week with whoever knows the exceptions. The two-week audit produces the rule map and the payback estimate before you commit to a build.

Document format matters. We test extraction against representative PDFs, scans, and other invoice types before agreeing coverage. Accuracy depends on document quality, required fields, and available reference data; uncertain results need review.

The two-week audit is a fixed fee, credited toward the build if you continue. Builds are scoped per workflow with a payback estimate up front — no percentage of recovery, no per-seat license.

Ownership and handover terms are set in the agreement. The handover includes the documented rules and code in scope, with the hosting, credentials, third-party services, and ongoing support needed to keep it running.

A retrospective review can compare payment history with available contract and rate data. We surface potential overcharges with supporting records; your team confirms the findings and decides what to pursue with vendors. Recurring checks can be scoped separately.

Yes. The scope can include a review of past payments and recurring checks against your AP rules. Data availability, tested coverage, and review timing determine which invoices and terms the workflow can check.