A survey of US accounting and finance professionals has found that almost half have a payments error rate above 3 per cent for global payables, costing thousands of dollars in payment resolution.

The survey, conducted by TechValidate and commissioned by Tipalti, showed a huge preference for manual processes in the accounts payable (AP) function, with the majority of those surveyed saying that their AP processes are more than 50 per cent manual. Specifically, more than 60 per cent of respondents said that more than half of their invoice collections process was manual, compared with payment approval routing (61 per cent), remittance (58 per cent), supplier communications (61 per cent) and payment issue resolution (78 per cent).

The survey also found that:

• three-quarters said that their supplier onboarding process was more than 50 per cent manual;
• 64 per cent have a mostly manual process for tax form collection and validation;
• 50 per cent have mostly manual processes for tax withholding and reporting;
• two-thirds have mostly manual processes for blacklist/AML compliance as well as for payment reconciliation.

Error rates in payments

Furthermore, the survey found that four out of five corporates that remit more than 500 payments a month stated a payment error rate of 1 per cent or higher, while 44 per cent had an error rate of more than 3 per cent. This leads to additional costs for payment resolution, in terms of expense and staff hours. The error rate of more than 3 per cent rises to almost half – 47 per cent – for companies that send payments globally to more than 6% of their suppliers.