Fintech advanced, but financial payment errors remain a challenge
On the eve of its 20th anniversary, Profectus has found accuracy in business transactions remains a significant priority for Australian businesses, despite better access to, and use of, data. This has led to Profectus recovering more than $120 million in transaction errors in recent years, and improving recoveries for its clients by an average of 36%.
Profectus reports a continued lack of accuracy, witnessed over the course of its two decade history, is driven by changes in people, processes, ERPs and agreements with suppliers, and important negotiations and agreements being hidden or lost in email correspondence.
Although the technology and capability to compute and analyse data has increased in most organisations dramatically, the trend in payment errors continues largely due to human factors. Profectus identifies that one of the reasons accuracy in business transactions remains a challenge is due to the effort required to get the correct data upfront. This results in incomplete or poor quality data for decision support. On top of this, the time and effort required to engage with suppliers to receive complete data upfront is still an issue.
CRO of Profectus, Matthew Lally says Profectus continues to see the same level of payment errors within procure to pay processes persisting at the same rates they observed 20 years ago – despite advances in finance systems / ERPs.
“You’d be shocked at the level of errors which occur, and they are mainly human-driven,” Matthew explains. “Whilst we have observed a proliferation of data for our clients over the last 20 years, most large corporates are still challenged to easily access quality data and insights to assist them make business decisions.”
“It’s a common occurrence to see decisions made with poor quality or incomplete data. The other shock is the total lack of visibility on detailed data that would help businesses make better decisions and spend less.”
“A recent client example is: in one day, a client bought over $6 million worth of a particular machinery part, they paid three different prices for the same part on the same day, and they didn’t know it happened. So, if on the day they bought it, if they had done so at the lowest price, they would have saved more than $2 million. We believe collaborative compliance technologies will help solve these problems by managing purchase price variances.”
Profectus is the only home-grown Australian technology and services company which leverages data analytics and business intelligence to ensure absolute transactional accuracy and safeguard businesses globally from errors leading to significant financial waste.
Profectus:
- Services more than 50% of the ASX top 100 and NZs largest companies
- Recovered more than $120 million in transaction errors in recent years
- Processes in excess of a billion records a month
- Improves recoveries for its clients by an average of 36%
More recently, Profectus has partnered with leading data analytics platform, Sisense, to provide even deeper insights into where transactional payment errors occur. Profectus is expanding the partnership to solve new problems for Australian Business – such as providing a solution to the Payment Times Reporting Scheme (PTRS) legislation which commenced on January 1, 2021.
Profectus takes a highly automated and data-driven approach to this newly required PTRS compliance, in order to save businesses time and money by:
- Submitting the reports to the Department of Industry on the organisation’s behalf,
- Setting up reporting for multiple entities,
- Gaining access to live remediation reporting via its Delta BI platform (powered by Sisense), and
- Providing visibility of progress against the PTRS metrics.
Passionate about innovation, Profectus puts over 20% of revenues back into research.
“Every time we find a new kind of error we update our algorithms to ensure the learnings are captured for all of our clients,” Chief Product Officer and Company Founder Robert Visentini says. “It’s this sort of investment into continued development and evolution that is critical for our industry to keep on moving forward and improving at scale to help establish accuracy, fairness and harmony in client-supplier relationships.”
Starting out in Recovery Audit in 2001 Profectus has grown to deliver outstanding results for many of Australia and New Zealand’s household name companies. The company provides best in class services and software to help ensure that its clients receive the full benefits of the commercial agreements they have in place with their supply chain partners and vendors, at the same time as helping vendors avoid nasty surprises that can arise and quickly add up over time.
CEO of Profectus, Chris Hutchins, says the past 20 years have marked a significant evolution in the company’s ability to help such their wide-ranging and growing base of leading businesses reap the benefits of absolute transactional accuracy and minimise financial ‘waste’ through the power of technology.
“Business technology has come a long way in the last 20 years, however even the best and most sophisticated companies still generate and pay significant amounts for human errors in the source to pay process. Profectus is proud of our history of enhancing the control frameworks of our client base, through our best in class suite of preventative, detective, and recovery solutions. At the milestone of our 20th anniversary we would like to extend our sincere gratitude to our fantastic team and to all of our clients for the opportunity to help them get closer to absolute accuracy in their accounts payable transactions.”
