IN THIS ARTICLE

 

Discrepancies and billing errors might seem small, not a priority at all.
But that’s not necessarily true.

Think about your own monthly bills. Streaming platforms, internet, your cellular plan, premium subscriptions, AI tools…the list goes on.

Individually, these charges may not seem significant. But together, they can change the whole picture of your personal finances.
And at the end of the month, you wonder where your money went.

Now imagine that same picture across hundreds of vendors, thousands of invoices, multiple teams, states, and countries.
Suddenly, those small charges aren’t so small anymore.
And tracking every invoice line and validating it against contracts becomes an impossible task to do manually.

Where spend leakage hides.

Spend leakage doesn’t usually show up as one obvious mistake.

It shows up in the details of every invoice:

An incorrect rate applied to a single line item. A service that was never deactivated after it stopped being used. A discount that was negotiated but never actually applied. A duplicate charge that slips through because it looks valid in isolation. A mismatch between what was agreed in the contract and what ends up being billed.

None of these are unusual on their own. In fact, they often look correct if you only look at the invoice in front of you.

The problem is that invoices are not reviewed in isolation. They are processed in volume, across vendors, services, and business units. And at that point, these issues stop being isolated exceptions and become patterns that are very hard to track manually.

An invoice can be fully approved, fully processed, and still contain charges that shouldn’t be there.

The real issue is not whether these errors exist. It’s how many of them are actually being caught before payment.

Incorrect rates

The price billed doesn’t match the agreed rate.

Duplicate charges

The same charge appears more than once.

Inactive services

You’re still paying for services no longer in use.

Missing discounts

Negotiated discounts aren’t reflected in the invoice.

Contract discrepancies

What’s billed doesn’t match the agreed terms.

Overbilling

You’re charged more than what was actually delivered.

Your AP team isn’t the problem

When an incorrect charge makes it through and gets paid, it is easy to think that someone should have caught it.

But think about what that would actually require. Every invoice would need to be checked line by line. Each charge would need to be compared against the right contract, rate, service, discount, or commercial condition.
And this would need to happen across hundreds of vendors and thousands of invoices, every month.

There is only so much a team can reasonably verify manually.
AP teams can review invoices, manage exceptions, and make sure approvals happen. But expecting someone to validate every single charge before payment is simply not realistic at enterprise scale.

The problem is not that people are missing things they should be catching. The problem is that the amount of information that needs to be checked has outgrown what a manual process can cover.

Invoice leakage is a systems problem, not a people problem.

Processing isn’t Validation

At this point, you might be thinking: isn’t this what our ERP or BSM platform is already supposed to do?

And yes, these systems are already doing an important part of the job.
They receive invoices, route them through workflows, manage approvals, and make sure they move through the payment process.

But processing an invoice and validating what is actually being charged are two different things.
An invoice can follow the right workflow, get the right approvals, and be processed correctly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that every line was checked against the contract, the negotiated rate, the services being used, or the commercial conditions that were agreed on.

That is how an invoice can make it through the entire process without anything looking wrong, while still including charges that shouldn’t be there.

An invoice can be correctly processed and still be financially incorrect.

Why Asignet?

Every invoice. Every line. Every rule. Before payment.

Asignet is built to validate what your business is actually being charged for before the invoice is paid.

It starts by bringing together the information needed to make that validation possible.
Vendor invoices can come in different formats, from different systems, and across different areas of spend.

Asignet uses invoice parsers and its Wayfast RPA and low-code automation technology to bring that information into one place.

Then comes the validation.

Instead of only looking for something that seems unusual, Asignet checks invoice lines against the rules and conditions that determine what your business should actually be paying.

If you have a contracted rate, does the invoice match it? If a discount was negotiated, was it applied? Is the service still active? Does the quantity match what was delivered? Has the same charge already appeared somewhere else? These rules are explicit.

A charge either complies with the conditions that were defined, or it doesn’t.
When something doesn’t match, it can be flagged before payment, so your team can focus on the exceptions that actually need their attention instead of manually reviewing every single line.

And automation doesn’t only make validation more accurate. It also makes the whole process faster.

Once invoices can be validated and approved without relying on a long manual review, payments can move faster too.
This gives your business the opportunity to pay earlier and take advantage of early-payment discounts when vendors offer them.

So instead of choosing between control and speed, you can have both: validate what you are paying for, catch discrepancies before payment, and move approved invoices forward faster.

And because Asignet brings IT and business spend together across TEM, MEM, SaaS, Cloud, and BSM, the same approach to spend control can extend across different areas of the organization.

Every invoice. Every line. Every rule. Before payment.

Spend Leakage looks different in every industry.

We have already seen that billing errors can happen in many different ways.

But they don’t necessarily look the same for every company.

Every industry works with different types of vendors, services, contracts, and purchasing processes. So, naturally, the things that need to be checked on an invoice are different too.

Think about a hospital and a manufacturing company.
They can both receive thousands of invoices every month, but what they need to validate is completely different.

For a hospital, it might be medical supplies, equipment, maintenance services, or charges across different facilities. For a manufacturer, it might be raw materials, partial deliveries, quantities, or substitutions.

Select your industry to see where spend leakage can show up.

Multi-Site
Healthcare
Restaurant
& Retail
Industrial
Manufacturing
Real
Estate
Energy &
Infrastructure
Food &
Beverage

Multi-Site Healthcare

Healthcare organizations work with many different vendors across different facilities.

Medical supplies, equipment, maintenance, food services, IT, and many other services can all have their own rates and agreements.
Now multiply that across every hospital, clinic, or facility in the organization.A rate can be wrong in one location.

A quantity might not match what was received. Or the same charge might appear more than once.

It can look like: incorrect rates, duplicate charges, quantity differences, or services billed to the wrong location.

Restaurant & Retail

Restaurants and retailers are constantly receiving products across many different locations.

Food, supplies, equipment, packaging, and other products can come from different suppliers, with prices and quantities that change frequently.

Maybe a supplier changed a price. Maybe a delivery arrived short but the invoice still shows the full order. Or maybe the same charge appeared twice.

When you multiply that across hundreds of locations and invoices, those differences start to matter.

It can look like: price differences, short deliveries, duplicate charges, or quantities that don’t match what was received.

Industrial Manufacturing

Manufacturing companies have a different type of complexity.

There are raw materials, MRO, equipment, subcontractors, purchase orders, and different delivery schedules to keep track of.
And there can be a lot happening between what was originally ordered, what actually arrived, and what eventually appears on the invoice.

Maybe only part of an order was delivered, but the full amount was billed. Maybe a product was substituted but charged at the original price. Or maybe the same line item appeared twice.

It can look like: partial deliveries, wrong quantities, duplicate line items, or substitutions billed at the wrong rate.

Real Estate & Property Management

Think about how many different vendors can be involved in managing just one property: maintenance, contractors, landscaping, security, cleaning services, utilities, and more.

Now multiply that across an entire portfolio.Here, validating an invoice is not only about checking the amount.
You also need to know if the work was actually completed and if what was billed matches what was agreed.

A contractor might invoice for completed work. A maintenance vendor might charge for parts and labor. But do those charges actually match what happened?

It can look like: incomplete work billed as complete, incorrect labor or material charges, duplicate invoices, or contract differences.

Energy, Utilities & Infrastructure

Energy and infrastructure companies can deal with very complex projects and high-value invoices.

There might be multiple subcontractors working on the same project, field services billed based on time and materials, or equipment deliveries connected to different project milestones.

This means there are many things that need to match before an invoice is actually correct.
Was the work completed? Do the hours match? Was the equipment delivered? Has the right milestone actually been reached?

And when the value of each invoice is high, even one discrepancy can make a difference.

It can look like: incorrect time and material charges, work billed before completion, milestone differences, or equipment quantities that don’t match what was delivered.

Multi-Site Healthcare

Food and beverage distribution moves fast.

Suppliers ship every day, invoices follow, and payments need to keep moving so the next orders can keep moving too.
But when everything moves quickly, there is also less time to stop and check every charge.

Maybe a supplier shipped less than what was ordered, but the invoice shows the full delivery. Maybe a commodity price changed and the wrong rate was used. Or maybe a freight charge doesn’t match what was agreed.

Across hundreds of supplier invoices, these differences can easily get lost in the volume.

It can look like: short shipments, incorrect commodity rates, freight differences, or quantities that don’t match what was received.

Different businesses have different things to validate, but they all need to know they’re paying the right amount.

Bussines Case

How much leakage does your current process never see?

At this point, the question is not only whether invoice leakage exists. It is what this problem can actually mean for a business when you look at the numbers.

And these are not hypothetical numbers.

A real Asignet Customer

One of our enterprise customers manages more than €20.8M in annual spend, with thousands of invoices and orders moving through the business every year.

Their environment includes:

€20.8M

Annual managed spend.

6,332

Invoices per year.

450

Active contracts.

6,915

Orders per year.

With Asignet, more than €279K in audit savings were identified, realized, or approved year to date.

But the savings are only one part of the story.
Think about all the work behind those thousands of invoices and orders.

Retrieving invoices, processing and approving them, generating AP files, managing contracts, creating orders, and following up when something needs attention.
These are necessary tasks, but they also take a lot of time when they need to be done manually.

By automating these repetitive processes, Asignet gives thousands of hours back to the teams doing that work.
The goal is not to replace the people behind the process. It is to give them more time to focus on the work that actually needs them: reviewing exceptions, analyzing spend, managing vendors, negotiating contracts, and making better decisions.

For this Asignet customer, the value came from both sides: finding money that shouldn’t be leaving the business and giving people back time that could be spent on higher-value work.

Stop Spend Leakage Before you pay.

  At this point, the idea is simple.

Spend leakage is not always easy to see. It can be hidden across thousands of invoice lines, contracts, rates, services, and vendors.
And at enterprise scale, expecting a team to manually catch every discrepancy is simply not realistic.

That doesn’t mean those discrepancies have to become part of the cost of doing business.
With the right validation process, they can be identified before the invoice is paid.

Asignet automates that process, validating invoice lines against the rules and conditions that determine what your business should actually be paying.
When something doesn’t match, your team knows where to look.

So instead of spending time trying to find errors across every invoice, they can focus on the exceptions that actually need their attention.

The best time to find spend leakage is before the money leaves your business.

See what Asignet could find in your invoices.