It’s a horrible feeling and one seen too often in business today.   You start digging into a small inconsistency with your supplier payments only to discover that someone in your organisation has been committing accounts payable fraud and directing money elsewhere.

Often people find out too late, if at all.  That’s why a small effort in prevention can go a long way.  The following are some practical ways Accounts Payable in Sage 300 CRE can assist in reducing your company’s risk of fraud. These tips can be set up by your staff, however if you need a hand putting these procedures in place, Thrive are here to help – give us a call.

• Review your User and Role Setup in the Sage Security Administration
  • Create roles based on modules within the software rather than individual user names and setup both a Super and a User role i.e. APSuper and APUser
  • Give the Super role full access to the module and give the User role select tasks, reports, inquiries and perhaps some setup items
  • If giving your APUser role access to setup Vendors, then consider limiting their ability to edit the Electronic Payment Settings and 1099/Tax Settings so that they can’t edit a vendors banking or ABN information

• Setup a single vendor ID for each supplier that you use, avoid duplicates
  • Sage AP has controls to ensure that you cannot enter duplicate invoice numbers for vendor ID
  • If you allow multiple vendor IDs for be setup for a vendor then it opens up the ability for someone to enter the same invoice number against each of those vendors
• Enter invoice numbers into Sage EXACTLY as they appear on the invoice
  • In an AP department where there is a high volume of invoices being processed it may be difficult to detect if an invoice has been entered twice, say once as 000000317 and again as 00000317
  • For Sage to identify if a duplicate invoice has been entered it must be exactly the same as previously entered, so you want to ensure that it’s always exactly as it appears on the invoice, even if that means you have to type a lot of zeros
• If changes to the vendor banking details is a concern, consider using Sage Alerts & Workflows to email you if the BSB or Account Number on a vendor setup has been changed

For regular hints & tips follow us on social media, or if you need assistance with a specific concern, send us an email.  We are here to help your business thrive.

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