B2B payment controls that accounts payable teams need to use

The world of B2B payments has become the wild west of corporate America. According to the recently released 2018 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 78% of businesses experienced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2017. This number has risen steadily since 2013, when only 60% of businesses indicated the same fate.

The source of this recent uptick? Look no further than the continued use of paper-based and manual processes to capture and pay invoices. Nearly 50% of business payments are processed with paper checks, in spite of their well-documented associated risk.

Today, 85% of IT security professionals are not confident that their companies have sufficient technology in place to protect against the relentless risk of fraud.

The bottom line: If your accounts payable team is still using paper-based processes to run accounts payable, your entire company is exposed to a wide variety of risks every time it receives, processes, and pays an invoice.

Here are three B2B payment controls that you need to have in place to keep your risk of fraud at bay.

Segregation of duties

The same principle of checks and balances that is keeping the United States government under control is also a must-have in your accounts payable process.

Segregation of duties is as simple as setting up a process where one person is responsible for queueing up business payments, and another is responsible for approving those payments before funds are released.

Has it ever made sense to give one person total autonomy over money coming in and out of a company's bank account? Still, ...