Monday 19th October, 2015

It seems that 43% of organisations would reconcile all their supplier accounts if they had unlimited time, while 16% would focus on their top 100 suppliers and 15% would prefer to concentrate on the top 20. This is a key finding of research undertaken by APN, commissioned by Statement-Matching.com that indicates that statement reconciliation has significant business value.

However, in reality, although 62% of respondents undertake the activity on a monthly basis, 25% only do so on an ad hoc basis, and 2% never reconcile their supplier accounts. Only 12% reconcile all their accounts each month, while 13% are not able to reconcile any over that timescale.

The study revealed that the top reasons for statement reconciliation are:

– To ensure no invoices are missing (81%)
– To ensure no credit notes are missing (60%)
– To spot duplicates (57%)

Other motives include identifying miss-postings, meeting internal and external audit compliance rules, improving the service to suppliers and reducing the number of supplier queries. 42% of respondents report that the number of supplier queries is high or very high.

The majority of supplier interaction is via email, with 28% of respondents saying they received up to 75% of queries this way. However, 35% reported that phone calls accounted for up to 50% of communication. 41% of respondents noted that they spent up to 10% of their time on post. For those using a portal, 23% of respondents noted that it only took up to 10% of their time. 5% report that they spend up to 75% of their time with suppliers via a portal.

In terms of the volume of work handled by the accounts payable team, the study showed that 44% of respondents process invoices for more than 3000 suppliers, 16% action more than 750,000 invoices per year.

"The results of this survey put specific figures on the anecdotal evidence we see when talking to clients and prospects,” explains Daniel Kimpton, co-founder and business manager at Statement-Matching.com. "There is no doubt that statement reconciliation is a valuable business activity but the challenge for accounts payable teams is finding the time for such a manual process as well as undertaking invoice processing."

"However, AP teams using a portal report spend less time dealing with supplier queries. Self-service via the internet is a day-to-day activity in the B2C world and it’s encouraging to see the trend being replicated between suppliers and accounts payable in the B2B environment as it lowers operating costs and provides instant access to the information required," Kimpton adds.

A full copy of the report, ‘APN Audit Survey 2015’ is available to download here.