When PayStream posed the question, “where’s the craziest place you’ve found a missing invoice?” to leading Account Payable industry representatives, we found some of the answers quite shocking and comical. We’ve highlighted a couple of the top responses to our question.  Please note that names were withheld for privacy purposes.

Interoffice “Oops”
A representative from a leading hotel chain writes, “In a previous company, we were cleaning up to move, and I found an interoffice envelope behind some file cabinets. I looked inside and there was an invoice returned from the customer with a $5,000 payment. The check/invoice was over two years old.  We had such poor controls, no one even knew it was missing and just carried the receivable for two years. The funny thing is we deposited the check, knowing for sure it would be rejected for a stale date, but it cleared, and the customer never even said anything.”

Disgruntled Delivery
A representative in the transportation industry provided us with a more scandalous missing invoice story, stating, “Many years ago, we apparently had some very disgruntled truck drivers (as we were in the middle of a labor dispute).  Instead of delivering the big red mail bags, they decided to hide them in the ceiling rafters above the dropped ceiling tiles at several of our locations.   Those bags weren’t found for YEARS…in fact they only surfaced when the ceiling had to be dismantled for replacement.  In addition to vendor invoices – the ‘lost’ mailbags contained customer checks, employee timecards, etc. I hate to even think about how much money all that rework ended up costing the company, due to the drivers’ shenanigans.”

ATM Blunder
Last, but not least, a national banking representative writes, “I once found an invoice with payment in an envelope that had managed to stay jammed inside one of our ATM’s that had been there for over 7 years! It was discovered years later while doing an in-depth maintenance on the ATM.  It goes without saying that it was of no use advising neither the customer nor the company of the found payment/invoice.”

There are of course, a myriad of ways to prevent errors like these thanks to the software solutions currently on the market that are designed specifically to address paper-related challenges. Yet, paper problems persist, especially in the obstacle course that is often the back office. According to our 2015 Invoice Receipt Management Report, most organizations continue to receive more paper, fax, and emailed invoices than electronic invoices. The result is typically a complex approval and payment chain, which eats up precious time and resources.

But while eInvoices may still be a far-off goal for many organizations, data capture and document management solutions like OnBase by Hyland, can go a long way toward making misplaced invoices (like in the above examples) a non-issue, especially when they tie in all of the related documentation that goes along with the invoice. When purchase orders are issued and given a unique tracking number, all the subsequent correlated emails and other documentation is automatically tied to the initial PO. Alerts are set up so that no matter when or how the invoice comes in (or doesn’t come in), staff knows what action to take to resolve the problem.

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