Spotting Duplicate Supplier Payments Before Month-End
Duplicates rarely announce themselves. Practical sampling patterns that surface repeated invoices across entities and periods.
Duplicate supplier payments often hide in plain sight: same invoice number with a suffix, same amount across two entities, or a credit note that never offset the original.
Sampling that finds duplicates
Compare payment extracts across a rolling ninety days on supplier ID, normalised invoice number, and amount. Include voided and reversed items—duplicates frequently sit next to incomplete corrections.
Process signals
High override rates at matching, shared inboxes for invoice intake, and month-end spikes in “urgent” additions to payment runs all raise duplicate risk. Document each signal so remediation has an owner.
A focused supplier payment audit can quantify exposure before you change systems.