Pay Multiple Suppliers at a Time, With Minimized Risk of Wrong Payment

Doing the Impossible: Multiple Right Payments, With Minimum Check

Imagine that all the effort put into checking a single invoice is mainly to prevent wrong payments to a supplier, yet wrong payments can still occur. A company accidentally made duplicate payments to 276 suppliers due to unreconciled payments, directly impacting its financial health as some suppliers still needed to refund the excess money.

What Is the Cost of Preventing Wrong Payment?

A coffee roasting company that sources from multiple suppliers wants to prevent this risk at scale. They send POs to numerous suppliers depending on the specialty of the sourced coffee. The invoice is accepted after the order is received and marked by GR, checking begins, and payment executes once all information matches. There are a few failure points where payment is put at risk:

• Pre-Payment the supplier might input the wrong amount into their invoice, or send an invoice against the wrong PO — especially in a high-ordering-frequency business. Airtight checks must be in place to ensure the correct amount is paid, which takes a lot of effort.
• Payment begins once a payment request is created based on the invoice entered in ERP. Human error may occur when entering the invoice amount, so the assigned person must be thorough, and an approval workflow is usually applied based on the invoice amount to limit risk.
• After Payment it's worth verifying the payment reached the right place. Finance can ask the supplier to confirm the funds were received, ensuring reconciliation from both sides.

Companies invest a lot of ongoing effort, yet information transparency still lags. Disputes with suppliers often happen, especially around invoicing and payment reconciliation, leaving procure-to-pay operations less than smooth — and it becomes hard for managers to know what is happening operationally due to uncentralized documents and data.

How Paper Helps Ensure the Right Payment

Using Paper significantly reduces operational effort and minimizes the human errors that cause false payments, while ensuring seamless information flow between suppliers and buyers, and across operational and managerial layers.

Paper automatically checks the invoice amount against the PO and GR. It also facilitates multi-layer approvals, and in case of disputes, enables communication between supplier and buyer via chat embedded in the document. All document changes are captured in Paper and accessible to both parties, giving everyone transparency to minimize fraud.

• Ensuring the invoice amount is right.
• Multiple invoices paid at once using a host-to-host connection.
• The bank account is validated, and payment refers to master data.

Multiple approved invoices can be paid at once — allowing the coffee company to pay 50 suppliers in a single pass, needing only one approval each month for the payment process. The payment request is connected to the invoice and supplier master data to ensure funds land in the correct bank account. Host-to-host payment in Paper also means payment can be made instantly, without opening another platform for manual input — within 15 minutes of payment, funds arrive at all suppliers.

After a successful transaction, reconciliation runs for all 50 payments, changing invoice status from unpaid to paid for both buyer and supplier via the supplier portal. WhatsApp notifications are sent in real time so all parties stay informed — the whole process is centralized in Paper and accessible to both the operational team and managers.