Global Energy Company: Transaction Compliance and Analytics Enhances Finance Outsourcing

Accenture took over management of this company’s global procure-to-pay operations providing accounts payable, employee travel and expense processing, vendor-related master data maintenance and some procurement card administration from Accenture's delivery centers in Chennai and Mumbai, India.

This world-leading, global company supplies services to oil and gas companies in more than 70 countries. It employs thousands of people and, in 2008 has revenue in excess of $25 billion.

Accenture provides the client with a wide variety of finance and accounting business process outsourcing services that form the company’s global procure-to-pay operations. To effectively deliver these services, Accenture deploys the Accenture Transaction Compliance and Analytics tool.

The tool monitors the company’s accounts payable records to help resolve and prevent overpayments. The Accenture Transaction Compliance and Analytics tool helps prevent duplicate or improper payments before they happen by scrutinizing large volumes of information (including invoice line-item data) and identifying where exceptions are likely to occur.

The tool also identifies any pricing inconsistencies, discount and rebate opportunities, and allowance claims. It also provides “vendor scrubs,” “hot queries” and data mining, and generates a variety of accounts payable reports.

In 2008, more than $2.2 million in vendor payments were identified for this energy company by the Accenture Transaction Compliance and Analytics tool as duplicate or erroneous. Of this amount, more than 98 percent were caught before payment was made. This resulted not only in savings of more than $2 million, but in a sizable increase in cash flow and a huge reduction in post-payment audit work. Within the first few months of 2009, another $300,000 in pending payments was also indentified as duplicate or erroneous.

Since this energy company outsourced its finance and accounting processes to Accenture, its cash flow has been smoothed, reconciliation costs reduced and post-audit costs and fees to third parties cut. In addition, one of the tool’s main advantages is that the amount of erroneous payment scenarios will decrease as time goes by because flagged claims automatically spur a root cause analysis by the tool into the heart of the problem. In this respect, the Accenture Transaction Compliance and Analytics tool is a process-improvement application as well as a problem-identification tool.