What is Profit Recovery?

Profit Recovery is the process of examining historic supplier disbursements and the whole procurement-to-pay cycle to highlight and then recover any overpayments or unclaimed financial benefits from an organisation's suppliers.

Examples of such items would be: duplicate payments to suppliers; overpayments as a result of payments made in the wrong currency; unclaimed input VAT; payments continuing at the end of a contract; incorrect prices charged by suppliers; unclaimed credit notes; property related overspends and many others.

Every organisation loses money in this way every year to a greater or lesser extent, perhaps millions of pounds. Our job is to ensure that all money belonging to our Client returns to our Client. The process (in the way Caatalyst operate it) only examines historic items: we never base our fees on future savings that our work may generate.

Error rates may significantly increase in the presence of certain risk factors such as high staff turnover, understaffed finance teams, changes in business structure or the implementation of new finance systems.

Use our Recoveries Calculator to see how much money your business could be losing as a result of these missed items.

Most large businesses in the UK and around the world have recognised the need for regular external review of their purchase-to-pay transaction cycle. Traditional auditors have retreated from large scale substantive transactional testing and will only look at potential errors if they have a very high materiality level.

Caatalyst utilise bespoke software (DATAmine™) to review every single line in your accounts payable transaction data looking for potential errors. Our audit teams use their experience to review the reports produced to highlight possible errors.

Identification of a potential error is only the first step. We first have to prove to ourselves that there is a definite claim by gathering related evidence, we then discuss and confirm the item with the supplier in question. Our work is complete once our Client carries out an agreed deduction against a supplier payment or a refund has been received. 90% of our audit work is carried out offsite, away from your offices to minimise disruption and maximise the concentration of Caatalyst resources.