Prevention is better than Cure!

Christopher Woo, Founder of Westgate Moore Associates (WMA), explains how their new Solution, Autorecs, is helping Clients protect working capital and recover from the risks posed by homeworking in the Pandemic!

Westgate Moore is one of the UK's leading providers of Payment Recovery Audits and has operated across the Public and Private Sector since 2004. In 2020 they developed Autorecs as a preventative Solution for Clients to prevent the reoccurrence of the issues that lead to a Payment Recovery Audit.

Our experience in reviewing Accounts Payable operations and the issues encountered in preventing payment discrepancies led us to conclude that insufficient emphasis placed on performing 100% supplier Statement Reconciliations. Hence Autorecs was born!

The Pandemic brought about rapid changes in working practices, impacting heavily on Finance Departments and Transactional processing teams such as Accounts Payable, in particular. This led to a resultant increase in risk to working capital. Moving lock stock and barrel to a home working environment would naturally increase the potential for payment discrepancies and Fraud!

Organisations accepted that homeworking would bring an element of risk to their operations, and all now face a 'Review' period as they return to the office. As many approach year-end, there is an immediate need to validate the working capital impact of processing activity conducted from home during the Pandemic.

This is where Recovery Audits and Autorecs come in! By deploying Autorecs you will quickly highlight the payment discrepancies that can have occurred when home working, ensuring no financial leakage and having Prevention to ensure 100% accuracy on payments in the future.

Autorecs is a fully automated supplier Statement Reconciliation solution. Critically this provides a 100% supplier Statement Reconciliation capability. However, I can hear you say, "Statements, Statements, Statements - we already reconcile the Top 10%. Why would we use this?"

Primarily because of Autorecs based on our Payment Recovery Software. Designed to prevent the same errors, discrepancies, and fraudulent payments we discovered in our Payment Recovery Audit! The good news is that it works just as effectively, even if you are not currently a Payment Recovery Client.

We start by taking the last two years of Transaction data into Autorecs and refreshing this daily in an overnight feed. We then take your Supplier Master file and take away the hard work! We contact your Suppliers and put in place a regular data feed to the Autorecs Portal of Supplier Statements for reconciliation to the Transaction data exported from your ERP system.

Each morning Autorecs will highlight the discrepancies in Statement Reconciliations AFTER it has first run the data through our advanced Payment Recovery Audit software! You get the benefits of a Payment Recovery Audit without having previously performed one! Financial leakage plugged!

It gets better! In our experience, the Supplier Statements reveal a cashflow windfall of unclaimed Credit Notes. Credit Notes can be forgotten in large Accounts Payable teams, challenged with poor end to end processes and under pressure to pay suppliers. Autorecs is the Tool to prevent time loss from becoming a cash flow loss.

Autorecs provides excellent Management Information and Insights, particularly to manage the Cabinet Office Duty to Report challenge. We have all the data, so Reporting is a push-button exercise, and the Supplier Insights are a treasure trove for Procurement teams.

We believe in Autorecs, and to prove it, we give it to all our Payment Recovery Audit Clients free for six months!

We were delighted to join the Finance Transformation UK partnership. We believe we can contribute significantly to the success of any Finance Transformation program by delivering compliant critical working capital processes and funding. Our clients' message is Westgate Moore provide Value to the bottom line via our Audit and Software Solutions.

Contact us for a chat today, as Prevention is better than Cure!

Author: Christopher Woo

Chris has been working in the AP & P2P arena for the last five years since being made a partner at Westgate Moore. Chris has first hand experience of working alongside AP managers understanding their pain points and has helped shape and guide the services and products that WMA have to offer.