It may be small consolation, but if your organization experienced some sort of payment over the past year, it certainly has company. Nearly three-quarters of companies – 73 percent, to be precise – experienced attempted or actual payment fraud in 2009, according to the 2010 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey. What’s more, thirty percent [...]
A week ago I blogged the answer to some questions about a recent press release regarding our Q1 growth... in the blog I let slip a teaser about a new product... after a few more queries... I will reveal the following: Powered by the underlying Lavante ConnectTM platform which is hands down, the premier tool for driving communication compliance across [...]
If you think LEGOs are strictly for the sippy-cup and coloring book set, guess again. Ron McRae built a functioning ATM from LEGO bricks. According to the description on www.MOCpages.com, a website dedicated to LEGO aficionados, the machine is built completely from LEGO parts. That includes the internal systems, such as an RFID sensor, that [...]
Amidst all the ruckus over the health care bill that recently passed, several important provisions have largely gone unnoticed. For instance, tucked within the 2,000-some pages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (H.R. 3590) is a provision that affects 1099 reporting. Specifically, businesses now will have to file Form 1099s for all payments [...]
P2P Industry - Service Providers - Roll Call 2009 #13 of 30 - JPD Financial General Information: In business since the 80's JPD Financial is a private firm in the recovery audit space that focuses on vendor credits. They work off site, away from their clients' facilities and drive their recovery by communicating in mass with their clients' vendors. They are compensated on [...]
Supplier credit benchmarking from the front lines. Every industry has its fair share of reports, surveys, data points, and sound bites. The Profit Recovery industry is no different. In the last few years we have performed quite a bit of analysis and benchmarking to uncovered some compelling data about recovering credits from your vendors and suppliers. [...]
On Wednesday, we released a straight forward news story about our Q1 success: Recovery Audit Technology Leader Lavante Continues Record Growth. The story reported that we are growing quickly and that we are moving to a new larger facilty in San Jose. The story was very direct and did not elaborate on too many details. I was suprised by a [...]
…shows some common ground and some differences between banks and corporate payments execs. At NACHA’s PAYMENTS conference last month, about 400 conference-goers from both the corporate and banking side participated in a short survey by Fundtech Ltd., a provider of banking solutions. The questions focused on both payments and the broader economy. […]
A finding from a researcher working at General Electric in the 1930s can help today’s accounts payable professionals ferret out fraud. Benford’s Law is named for Frank Benford, the GE physicist who tested and publicized the theory; it’s sometimes called the first-digit or leading-digit law. It holds that in many, (albeit not all) lists of numbers, about 30 percent will start with the number one, about 18 percent with the number two, and only 5 percent will start with either eight or nine. (While the law is named for Benford, he actually wasn’t the first to note this phenomenon. Simon Newcomb, an astronomer, wrote about it in the 1800s, although his research was largely ignored.) Of course, this seems completely counter-intuitive. Most of us would guess that in any group of numbers, every digit would show up first about every one out of nine times, or 11 percent of the time. As Benford discovered, that’s not the case. Instead, the probability (P) that the first digit is a specific number, D, can be calculated with the following formula: PD = log10 (1 + 1/D). The probability that a specific digit is first is highest for 1, and declines from there. Benford’s law can be applied within accounts payable to help track down instances of fraud. Here’s why: when someone tries to submit phony invoices, the tendency is to include an excess of numbers that begin with digits other than one or two. Software programs can be designed to flag transactions if many of the totals start with higher digits. […]
A survey of more than 200 corporate financial executives, most working in Europe or North America, emphasized the importance of the accounts receivable function on corporate cash management. The survey was conducted in May and June of last year by gtnews.com and SEB, a European financial firm more properly known as Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB. When asked which process had the greatest potential to improve the management of an organization’s cash, participants mentioned the receivables function most frequently mentioned; nearly one-third of respondents said that it could help them. About 13 percent of respondents said that the AP process had the most potential. […]