In this instructional video, Sachin Sharma, founder of Precare Desk, addresses the costly issue of duplicate vendor payments that can drain thousands of dollars from a company. He outlines three practical, immediately implementable controls to prevent such errors: (1) a double‑approval workflow where two senior staff members (e.g., controller and CFO or accounting manager) review each payment batch; (2) a purchase‑order (PO) matching process that requires every invoice to be matched against an existing PO before approval, thereby catching repeated invoices; and (3) a duplicate‑detection routine that uses simple scripts to flag invoices with similar amounts, vendor names, or near‑identical invoice numbers, and also identifies vendors who habitually submit duplicate invoices so the company can intervene. Sharma then highlights a common underlying mistake—manual data entry of invoice numbers—where a clerk mistypes an invoice identifier, causing the system to treat the same invoice as distinct and trigger a duplicate payment. He wraps up by summarizing the three controls and urging viewers to subscribe for more AP automation content.
Chapters
I recently spoke to a controller who was frustrated because his team made not one duplicate payment, but two duplicate payments and thousands of dollars sent to the vendors. And now he has to work with the team and the vendors to get the money back from the vendors. If you're ever in a situation where the team has made duplicate payments or you fear that the team is making duplicate payments, this video is for you. Because here I'll show you three simple strategies that you can implement to ensure that your team never makes another duplicate payment and stick till the end where I'll share one common mistake that you are probably not aware and that which is probably causing most of your duplicate payments. If you're joining me for the first time, welcome. My name is Sachin Sharma. I am the founder of Precare Desk, where we help growing companies automate their processes around purchasing and accounts payable and of course help avoid duplicate payments. So let's jump right in. Our number one strategy is to implement a double approval process. So here is a simple trick. Make sure two people are approving the payment batch that is being paid out to the vendor. So the first person, if, let's say your accounting clerk or AP manager is creating the batch for payment, then the controller and CFO should approve Controller more from a perspective of checking for duplicate payments. Or they might have more history around the vendor or how we work with them. And cfo, of course, more from, you know, cash flow planning and so on. If it's just controller and accounting manager, then maybe AP clerk should create a payment batch and accounting manager and controller should release a payment. So implement a double approval process that will certainly help with reducing the duplicate payments. Number two is implement a PO matching process. Many times the duplicate payments are happening because a vendor might send the same invoice twice. They might be asking for like the payment information and they just send the same invoice as a proof. Hey, here's the invoice attached and you might just process it again. And the way to avoid that is to have a purchase order upfront against which you can match the invoice. So now if the same invoice is sent twice, system will catch it, right? And say, all right, here's an invoice that's already issued against this purchase order and so that you're not approving the same invoice twice. If you do not have a, I would say PO matching process, then what lands up happening is you're routing this to a requester or individual user to do the approval. They might approve it without noticing that they might have approved similar invoice, you know, 30 days before or whatever, or 15 days before. Everybody's busy. So you want to make sure that you're providing enough information to your stakeholders to. So that they can make the best call on whether to approve an invoice or not. And having a PO matching process helps a lot. So that's number two. Number three is have a process to catch duplicate payments. So what do I mean by that? A simple step that you can implement is just have a simple script that looks for invoices that are similar in amount and from the same vendor, as an example. So a lot of times vendors might submit invoices where the invoice number is similar, so they might add one at the end or a or B at the end. And all you could just simply have a process for you to just look for those anomalies and identify the duplicates. Number two is you could identify vendors who are probably not following your process and just sending duplicate invoices. So a simple thing could be a vendor always send this invoice twice because that's what their process is. So it might be easier for you to reach out to the vendor and say, hey, why do you submit these invoices twice? Change the process there, and that goes a long way, right? So those are three simple strategies you can implement today. Now, regarding the one simple mistake that we see across the board is manual data entry. So what I mean by manual data entry, your invoices are entered by an AP clerk into your accounting system, and they might make the mistake of typing in the invoice number slightly differently, which is a very common problem that we see. And as a result, that is, the system is now considering the same invoice twice and hence a duplicate payment. So just to summarize, to make sure your team is not making duplicate payments, implement these three simple strategies, right? Implement a double approval process. Implement a PO matching process so invoices are matched against the purchase order. And then the third thing is to implement a process for identifying the duplicate payments. Now, if you like this video, feel free to hit the subscribe button and you will get notified when we publish videos like this. Thank you for joining me today and I'll see you in the next video.
