AI Automation and Agents

Accounts payable recovery
duplicate payments found in your own ledger and stopped at the control

Money leaves through duplicate invoices, pricing errors, missed credits, changed bank details and fraud, and it is found late or never. We analyse your ledger, vendor master, purchase orders, receipts, card transactions and bank change log inside your own environment, evidence every item we find, and fix the control that let it through. Your team decides and makes every claim.

Book a Duplicate Payment Diagnostic

The first conversation is confidential, without obligation and without charge.

Findings are planned at three to six weeks from data access.

What does the diagnostic look for?

Payments that should not have been made, or not in that amount or to that account, and the control gaps that let them through.

Invoices paid more than once, including near duplicates with a changed invoice number, date or amount
Payments above the contract or purchase order price
Credits never taken
Supplier bank detail changes, and the approvals around them
Vendor master risks: duplicate supplier records, dormant suppliers reactivated, and details that do not match
The control that allowed each item through

Who is this for?

It is for chief financial officers, group financial controllers and heads of shared services or accounts payable, often with the chief audit executive as co-sponsor, and for government chief financial officers working with their fraud control area.

A good fit:

You want to know whether duplicate payments, overpayments or missed credits are leaving your ledger
You can give read-only access, inside your own environment, to the ledger, vendor master, purchase orders, receipts, card transactions and bank change log
You want the control behind each item fixed, as well as the item found

Not a fit:

You want a firm to contact suppliers and collect on your behalf. We identify and evidence each item, and your team, or a recovery partner you appoint, collects
You want a recovery amount promised before the work starts. We do not quote one
You need advice on the tax treatment of adjustments. That is for your tax adviser

What do you receive?

Evidence for every item, graded so your team knows which to pursue first, and the fix for every control gap.

Findings graded by confidence
An evidence pack for each item, ready for your team to raise with the supplier
A vendor master risk list
A control gap report, with the fix for each gap
A one-page summary for the audit and risk committee

We report identified, confirmed and received amounts separately.

Amounts are reported as recorded in your ledger. The GST treatment of any adjustment is for your tax adviser.

How does it run, week by week?

It runs on your history, read only, and does not touch your payment run.

Planned elapsed time Three to six weeks from data access to findings

When	What happens
Before data access	Scope agreed. Read-only access inside your environment to the ledger, vendor master, purchase orders, receipts, card transactions and bank change log. You name the one person to be told if the analysis suggests possible fraud.
From data access	Analysis across the history in scope. Each candidate item graded by confidence and checked against the invoice and the remittance.
Findings, planned at three to six weeks from data access	Evidence packs, the vendor master risk list, the control gap report and the committee summary, presented to you.
After	Your team raises and collects each claim. We recommend the control fixes, and offer payment integrity monitoring if you want the checks to continue.

Three to six weeks from data access is the planned time to findings. Data access usually sets the start date, so we agree it when the diagnostic is scoped, and we replace planned figures with measured ones as engagements complete.

Who contacts suppliers, and who receives the money?

You do.

Precision identifies and evidences each item. Your team decides, makes and collects every claim. We do not contact suppliers to demand payment, and we do not receive recovered money.

Where your team lacks the capacity, you may appoint a recovery partner directly. If we name one, we take no referral fee.

What happens if you find something that looks like fraud?

We stop.

Where the analysis suggests possible fraud, we stop, report only to the person named in the engagement, and continue only as your counsel directs.

Where does our data go?

It stays in your environment. The analysis runs inside it, with read-only access.

Sovereign and Australian-hosted options

Sovereign:: on your premises, or with an Australian-owned provider, operated and supported from Australia. Available on request.
Australian-region:: a global provider's Australian region, configured so your data is stored and processed in Australia. The provider remains subject to the laws of its home country.

Your data is not used to train public AI models.

Every build proposal carries a hosting statement naming each service, its region, the model family, whether any processing leaves Australia, and where our people and tools access your data from.

We check your ERP and accounting platform's terms before any tool reads your data, because some platforms restrict how their data may be used with AI.

If monitoring uses a language model, it runs on one of the hosting options above.

How do you stop it happening again?

By fixing the control behind each item and, if you want it, by checking every pay run before it is released.

Payment Integrity Monitoring:

an exception queue before every pay run, for your team to clear;
verification of every supplier bank detail change;
a monthly integrity report;
the agent flags, and a named person in your team clears. It cannot clear its own flag;
it is designed to fail open: it never blocks a pay run, and a missed check is logged and reported the same day;
it runs inside your environment, planned to go live six to twelve weeks after the diagnostic.

Ask about payment integrity monitoring

Who builds the monitoring, and who is accountable?

A Precision engineer who scoped your build leads it through go-live, and every engineer on the team works to our method and our bar.

You will not be handed to an account manager. The statement of work names the lead engineer and any contractor on the team, and a named senior practitioner is accountable for the engagement.

We build agents that complete multi-step work within limits you set, with every action recorded in an audit log we configure for the build, and a named person accountable for each decision that affects a client, an employee or the public.

Agents read, match, flag, draft and recommend. A named person approves anything that moves money, changes a supplier's bank details, sends a demand, makes a decision that significantly affects an individual, reports a figure to a board, or changes production. An agent never raises and clears its own exception.

When we have built a system, we never review it independently. Any independent review of it goes to another firm. Read our independence and conflict rules

How is the payback of monitoring measured?

Against a business case agreed before we build. Any payback figure for monitoring is worked out from the error rate your diagnostic measures, and set out in the proposal.

Every build carries a business case that states its expected payback period and the assumptions behind it. We measure the result at a formal review after go-live and report it against that case.

Our clients have seen a return on their investment within 90 days of go-live. For suitable use cases, a return can be expected within 90 days of go-live, measured against the baseline we agree with you before we build.

Common Questions

The questions we are asked most

How do you identify duplicate payments in accounts payable?

Compare every payment against every other on supplier, amount, date and invoice number, allowing for the small differences that defeat exact matching: a transposed digit, a changed invoice suffix, the same invoice paid to two supplier records. Then confirm each candidate against the invoice and the remittance. The diagnostic does this across the whole history in scope and grades each item by confidence.

How common are duplicate payments?

We do not quote a rate, because published rates vary widely and most come from outside Australia. The diagnostic measures yours from your own data.

How do we prevent duplicate payments?

Three controls do most of the work: checks on invoice number and amount before approval that catch near matches, independent verification of every supplier bank detail change, and a single, clean vendor master. The control gap report shows which of these is missing in your process and where.

Will it disrupt our pay run?

No. The diagnostic is read only and runs on history. If you add monitoring, it is designed to fail open: it never blocks a pay run, and a missed check is logged and reported the same day.

What does the diagnostic cost?

The diagnostic is scoped to your situation, and its fee is agreed before work starts. If you add monitoring, it is scoped and priced in its own proposal.

Do you advise on tax or on our legal position with a supplier?

No. Amounts are reported as recorded in your ledger, and the GST treatment of any adjustment is for your tax adviser. Where a claim depends on your legal position with a supplier, your counsel advises.

How we work, in writing

Duplicate payments, found and stopped at the control.