About 10 years ago, Open Text Corp. offered up an invoice management system as a service engagement effort that it customized for companies. Today, with many parts of the world just beginning to recover from the throes of a recession, white collar crime hitting the headlines (Madoff, anyone?) and bottom lines, the landscape has changed – and automating processes like accounts payable has become an attractive option for some enterprises.
“The realization came about that there was repetition there – you always have the same problems and you basically have some of the same resolutions,” said Tom Walker, a portfolio manager of SAP accounts payable solutions at Open Text. “So we put it in a product instead of a custom implementation.”
The finished product is Open Text’s SAP invoice management system, a software solution that “provides granular audit trails” that Walker likens to the “quintessential Big Brother/Big Sister that’s watching. Every time there is a touch point in the process, it records who touched it, what date, what time and what their touch point did.”
The idea was to create a network of crosschecks to safeguard against AP authorization controls that have failed in the past. For example, a vendor may send a fictitious invoice to be approved by a company that never received its product or service. If it is signed off by a company representative colluding with the vendor, it may be enough for the accounts payable department to pay the invoice without properly verifying the document.
“In an optimized solution, you have business rules that determine who should receive the invoice in the first place and … (it goes) into accounting as opposed to (employees) out in the field,” Walker explained. “(It’s) really looking back at the manual process and deciding where are the gaps, the weaknesses, the opportunities for fraudulent activities. It’s a sad thing to say, but it’s a true fact that’s been around for a million years that every time a human is involved, you open up a Pandora’s box.”
