A preview of our white paper on AP data mining in midcap and large organizations. The complete whitepaper is available on request.

1. Data Mining
Accounts Payable
Process Risk &
Error
How to reduce risk, error, complexity and cost in the
Accounts Payable process
Based on a benchmark study of 250 companies with a total of more than 950
billion US Dollars in Accounts Payable data worldwide, this white paper provides
insight into the most commonly seen errors and risks in the Accounts Payable
process
Transparent B.V.
© 2011

2. How to reduce risk, error and complexity
in the Accounts Payable process
Based on a benchmark study of 250 companies with a total of more
than 950 billion euro in Accounts Payable data worldwide, this white
paper provides insight into the most commonly seen errors and risks
in the Accounts Payable process.
Introduction
In today’s volatile business environment, Finance strives to have a flexible and
responsive finance function in order to support the business in making the smartest and
fastest decision. Recent research by Free University Amsterdam shows that
organizations which strive to have a flexible and proactive finance function:

Exercise control over several leading indicators instead of many KPIs,

Implement rolling forecasting,

Use trend information and relative performance indicators,

Value knowledge sharing, learning and collaboration within the finance
organization
From this perspective finance professionals want, among other things, to review and
improve their performance based on hard, objective data. According to research by the
Aberdeen Group (2009), CFOs’ challenges in improving financial performance are

reducing costs (73%),

optimizing working capital (70%),

forecasting financial performance (53%) and,

reducing errors (43%).
Financials therefore have, among other things, an inherent interest in management
information in the following areas:

3. 
Historical and current payment performance

Types of payment errors that occur

Cost control, profitability

Contract Compliance

Payment terms, DPO

Extent of contamination of the vendor master file

Supplier behaviour and risks associated with the supply base
Based on hard, objective data this white paper offers insight into the causes and effects
of the most common errors and risks in the Accounts Payable process. The study is
based on the results of a benchmark of 250 companies with a total of more than 950
billion euro in Accounts Payable data in various industries and countries worldwide.
Brief overview of this white paper:
Supplier behaviour and risks associated with the supply

Industries with the largest number of suppliers with small invoices

Industries that have the most suppliers with the same bank account number

Industries with the highest percentage of inactive suppliers among the total
number of suppliers.

Risks associated with the suppliers location
Extent of contamination of the vendor master file

Insight into the most common errors that occur in the vendor master file

Top five industries with highest error rates in Accounts Payable

Insight into the most common errors per top five industry

Short-term and long-term solutions to resolve and prevent the most common
errors

4. About the author:
Founded in 2000, Transparent is an international financial-services provider
specializing in data mining of Accounts Payable. The company has rapidly grown into a
global operation, with operations in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, India, France,
the United Kingdom, Italy and the United States of America.
Our services include the analysis of outgoing payments and associated processes with
the aim to convert payment data into detailed management information. Alongside the
analysis, we identify, verify and collect undue payments on a no-recovery no-fee basis.
The results are presented in an easy-to-read dashboard and used by Transparent to
provide clients with management information and advice regarding their Accounts
Payable processes.
CFOs’ of blue-chip and medium-sized companies around the globe rely on Transparent
to provide them with enterprise-level transparency of their payment processes and with
sensible improvement recommendations. Moreover, many of our clients have seen an
immediate profit increase upon engaging our contingency-based recovery services. Our
analysis is robust, fast, risk-free, and doesn’t consume our clients’ resources, due to our
excellent technology deployment and fully-industrialized process.
For more information about the benchmark, including a customized benchmark,
our services and/or other inquiries, please feel free to contact:
benchmark@transparent.eu
Or contact us directly via:
Mr. Joep van den Brink, MSc.
Marketing Manager
Joep.van.den.brink@transparent.nl
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/joepvandenbrink
www.transparent.eu
+31 (0) 20 4684 648