LAVANTE Whitepapers

PayStream Advisors White Paper

Enhancing Supplier Management & Controls through Automation

Companies have invested vast resources into implementing complex corporate ERP and finance systems in an effort to maintain transactional excellence and accurate vendor master data.

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IOFM Vendor Management Survey Report

Finance Professionals Surveyed on their Vendor Management Practices

The Institute of Finance & Management (IOFM) recently surveyed finance professionals, including accounts payable department managers, supervisors and controllers, to learn about the level of automation in their organization’s accounts payable department, specifically focusing on the tasks related to vendor/supplier management.

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The Case of the Disappearing Credits

Why a Fast Start to Credit Recoveries is a Best Practice

While the term ‘time is of the essence’ usually refers to legal matters, it unfortunately applies equally as well to the recovery of vendor credits. For, as the research in this paper demonstrates, waiting to claim credits from your vendors is a costly course of action. Over time, they simply evaporate.  The research presented is based on data collected through access to the Lavante Recovery platform, which backs this simple thesis: Time really does matter when it comes to vendor credit recoveries. Waiting a year or two to recover them is expensive. That expense comes not from the time value of money but rather from the vendor finding uses for open credits other than returning them to their customers.

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The Future of Accounts Payable

Five Top Transformative Changes Coming to AP

What lies ahead for Accounts Payable and Shared Services? In these highly volatile and challenging economic times, can AP leverage technologies and processes in ways that increase their strategic relevance within their organization? This report reviews five top changes that are coming to the AP industry which have the potential to dramatically increase the value AP / Shared Services can bring to its parent organization. These changes point the way forward, identifying new processes, methods and mind sets to help drive manual labor out of AP processes, while significantly improving accuracy and efficiency.

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Developing and Maintaining Accurate Supplier Data – Overcoming Dirty Supplier Information in Finance and Procurement

By Thomas Kase, Lead Analyst, Spend Matters, and Jason Busch, Executive Editor, Spend Matters

“The lack of consistent, high-quality supplier information is costing the typical Global 2000 company tens of hundreds of millions of dollars — annually!”

This new research report reveals the often hidden impact that “dirty” vendor data has on an organization. The findings in the report show the breadth of this issue before discussing how AP and Procurement can fix the problems and deliver continuous, long-term savings to their companies.

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Statement Audits: An Untapped Source of Dollars for Your Company

By David Schmidt, Senior Advisor, PayStream Advisors

If you’re not doing a comprehensive statement audit, you are missing a huge recovery opportunity. PayStream presents this comprehensive industry white paper focused on how AP and Shared Services professionals from across industries can implement a statement audit (ongoing supplier AR reconciliation) that expands traditional recovery audit processes and delivers more dollars to your company.

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Navigating The New 1099 Tax Laws - Q&A Transcript

The following is a transcription of the Question & Answer session from the Lavante webinar "Navigating The New 1099 Tax Laws", including questions that were not answered live.

Navigating The New 1099 Tax Laws - Understanding and preparing for New 1099 Reporting Changes

By now, either the panic has set in or you are simply unaware of the new 1099 reporting requirements set forth by the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act that passed in March 2010. The new legislation provides an Amendment to Section 6041 of the Internal Revenue Code, which governs Form 1099 reporting requirements. Section 6041 will now require 1099-MISC reporting for any payments to a single payee that total $600 or more in a calendar year.

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Cash Recovery As a Process

Every year companies issue millions of dollars in overpayments and walk away from millions more in the forms of lost rebates, missed pricing discounts, and non-refunded returns. Regardless of company size and internal controls, overpayments and other missed opportunities will almost certainly occur. Traditional cash recovery is labor intensive, making it nearly impossible to address the entire spend population, and can result in leaving millions of dollars for vendor AR departments to manage as unclaimed property.

A Purchasing Card Program You Can Be Proud Of

It's not difficult to figure out why p-card use continues to rise. The cost of processing a transaction done via a purchasing card comes to about $19. That’s less than one-fourth the $89 it takes to move a transaction through the traditional purchase order process, according to a RPMG report. P-cards also remove about eight days from procurement cycle time. Clearly, purchasing card programs have much to offer. However, several steps are key to achieving these benefit...

Segregation of Duties

As accounts payable professionals know, the practice of segregating duties is a cornerstone of solid internal control. It’s based on the thinking that by ensuring no single employee handles more than one process within the procurement, payment and accounting for the purchase of goods or services, the risk of fraud drops. As a result, any attempt to move money or other assets outside the company would require collusion between at least two employees. This makes it more difficult to carry out a fraudulent activity, and more likely that the fraud will be discovered.

Seven Sins of Recovery Auditing

While committing one of the seven deadly sins in the field of recovery auditing won’t lead to eternal suffering, it can cost your company money and reflect negatively on your job performance. In an effort to help you avoid such a fate, we’ve identified the seven most common and costly recovery auditing mistakes.