Managing Accounts Payable

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March 2005 Table of Contents [ toggle snippets ]

• MAP March 2005 (full PDF issue)
• SARBANES-OXLEY TOOLKIT: 16 Practices to Ensure Adequate Controls Related to Your Payments;
  A Killer AP Service: The Telecom Audit;
  Benchmark Your T&E Against Metrics and These Best Practices;
  What Your P-card Fraud Audit Program Should Include;
  Use These Metrics to Evaluate Your Payment Timing Practices;
  Welcome Letters: Getting Your Vendor Relationship Off on the Right Foot;
  The COSO Framework: A Primer;
  News Briefs (March 2005);
  Accounts Payable Calendar (March 2005);
  Accounts Payable Manager's Forum (March 2005)
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• Sarbanes-Oxley Toolkit: 16 Practices to Ensure Adequate Controls Related to Your Payments
• One of the places that corporations are most vulnerable when it comes to stringent internal controls is the payment process. Before Sarbanes-Oxley, lack of adequate controls in this area only opened the company up to fraud or duplicate payments, but now a company without adequate practices in this arena opens itself up to SEC censure. What follows is a list of steps that you can use to ensure you have the proper payment processes in place.
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• A Killer AP Service: The Telecom Audit
• Do you have any idea whether your phone bill is correct? Do you know (or understand) what all those extra taxes and charges are for? The problem is exponentially larger for corporations with thousands of lines, data feeds, and other telecom services. As you might expect with services whose pricing is complex, some bills are overstated. In fact, industry experts estimate (depending on whose figures you believe) that telecom invoices are inflated by anywhere from 5% to 20%. Even if the actual figure is on the low side of the estimate, that’s still an awful lot of money going out the door that shouldn’t be. And, the market is reacting. Here’s a look at what AP needs to know about this emerging AP service.
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• Benchmark Your T&E Against Metrics and These Best Practices
• One of the places where real-world implementation falls off the AP-best-practice track is in travel and expense management and reimbursement policies. This should be of some comfort to the legion of accounts payable professionals who work at firms that otherwise employ AP best practices but are still in the age of the dinosaur when it comes to T&E. Business Travel News (BTN) recently surveyed 236 companies of all sizes to see what practices they employ. What follows is a look at T&E practices being used today in corporate America. It also includes recommendations to get companies using less than ideal procedures up to best-practice levels.
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• What Your P-card Fraud Audit Program Should Include
• P-cards can be a dream come true for accounts payable managers when it comes to handling the numerous small-dollar invoices that litter many accounts payable departments. But that fantasy can quickly turn to a nightmare when fraud occurs. Ideally, controls will be so tight that this does not happen. But should a fraud slip through these ever-stringent controls, accounts payable professionals need to put themselves in a position to catch it quickly. How? The best way to uncover fraud before it becomes widespread is to establish a good auditing program. Speaking at a recent IOMA audio conference, UPS Capital’s Tom Wissel identified the components of such a program.
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• Use These Metrics to Evaluate Your Payment Timing Practices
• From time to time accounts payable managers find themselves in heated discussions with supervisors who want to stretch their payment terms unofficially by simply paying vendors late. It may seem like a relatively easy thing to do—at least to the controller or CFO. But they aren’t the ones who are going to get all those where’s-my-money calls from disgruntled vendors. Some of these controllers and CFOs will claim “everyone’s doing it.” Before getting into a heated confrontation over the veracity of that statement, it’s a good idea to check out what other companies in your industry are doing.
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• Welcome Letters: Getting Your Vendor Relationship Off on the Right Foot
• Why is it that some accounts payable departments seem to have few problems with their vendors, while others can’t seem to get them to do anything right? It may come as a surprise to some reading this, but most (okay—not all) vendors who cause your blood to boil don’t set out to do so. They truly don’t know what’s expected of them. Part of the answer lies at the beginning of the relationship. By setting down the ground rules in the beginning, the vendor knows what’s expected and can comply. That’s where a welcome letter comes in.
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• The COSO Framework: A Primer
• If you’ve looked into what you should be doing to make sure your AP department is in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, you’ve probably run into the COSO framework. Here’s a brief history along with an overview of how this relates to AP and SOX.
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• News Briefs (March 2005)
• 
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• Accounts Payable Calendar (March 2005)
• 
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• Accounts Payable Managers' Forum (March 2005)
• Managing AP’s work when employees are absent. Reducing the number of high-volume, low-dollar invoices in AP.
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