A CFO's life: Not another audit meeting?

Written by John Coates

Wednesday, 31 August 2011

One thing I loathe as a CFO, is attending Audit Committee Meetings and having to listen to a report delivered by the Internal Auditors relating to duplicate payments through the accounts payable system. I get annoyed for a number of reasons:

As CFO, I feel my reputation becomes tarnished due to lack of integrity from the system my team manages
If it is a repeat audit item then my incentive plan may be marked down and my ego hit even harder
Most importantly though, the organisation that employs me is penalised through its cash flow, which affects a larger stakeholder base.

Fortunately today, PLAUT has a forensic product called Cash Tracker which can trawl through the accounting system and report on duplicate payments before they are processed for payment. For large organisation this can save many tens of thousands of dollars and for the very large organisations, millions.

Statistics suggest that over 1% of payments can be duplicated. Imagine a one billion dollar sales company with a margin of 20% and employee cost averaging 40% of costs. That would leave about $480 million of spend and a minimum one per cent would yield a saving of $4.8 million. Staggering numbers!

I understand that Cash Tracker can also provide forensic search through employee records, making it an even better value proposition...