Before coming on board Xelix, Saint Luke’s Health was relying on Accounts Payable recovery audits to spot mistakes like duplicate or overpayments. These audit firms take anywhere from a 15-25% cut of the value of errors they spot and recover.  On top of the high fees, they often don’t catch 100% of your errors.

Mia Sutherland, AP Manager at Saint Luke's Health explains:

“They only look for the largest errors, and there’s still loads of minor errors [after the audit]. They’re going to look for the high dollar [items] because they want their payday.”  
 
Reactive payment auditing isn't cost-effective and has several negative, knock-on effects. For one, because the money has already left your business, recovery isn’t always possible, and when it is, it can be a huge hassle. Additionally, when these firms only go after big ticket items, they miss most of the mistakes and don’t always give you insights to drive process improvements.

“We weren’t able to see exactly why [errors were happening] ... we had to drill down to verify the information ... so it took longer to process a recovery audit request.”  
 
The most effective use of time for your business is to learn from your mistakes and prevent them from happening again instead of needing a recovery audit year on year.  

With proactive payment auditing from Xelix, you can move away from expensive recovery audits and instead prevent errors before the payment run, giving you more cost control and helping you stop paying for the same mistakes.  

Xelix’s Transactions module helps Saint Luke’s monitor payments to spot duplicate/incorrect payments, tax violations, payments to wrong suppliers and even fraudulent activity. On day one, we apply our technology backwards to conduct an audit of your historic transactions for free. With Saint Luke’s Health, we found $258K missed by their recovery audit firm.  

Moving payment auditing in-house has been a time and money saver for Saint Luke’s Health. They now spot errors ahead of time, and instead of trying to recover money after it’s left the business, they prevent it going out the door in the first place and protect cashflow. Since using Xelix, they’ve prevented nearly $12m in overpayments. In recovery fees, that would be almost $3m.

Mia and her team also use the insights the platform gives them to perform root cause analysis. They can see gaps in their process and drive improvements to prevent errors from happening again.  
 
"In our last audit, a vendor changed their name slightly in the process of releasing payment for an invoice, which meant we paid a $50,000 invoice twice. Because it’s an invoice we only pay once a year, we wouldn’t have caught it or known why it happened. With Xelix, we can see invoice error reasons like ‘Incorrect Vendor’ and keep those payments from being released in the first place."

Before Xelix, Mia’s team didn’t enjoy reconciling supplier statements – like many AP teams - and tracking this activity was almost impossible. The process was heavily manual and inefficient, and vendor statements weren’t kept in a centralised system. 

“The process was manual before Xelix. We would write on our statements, and after we completed our statements, we were supposed to scan them into the system... We were probably 75% paper.”   

Members of her AP team had statements going to personal email inboxes, and without visibility, Mia couldn’t stay on top of team productivity or bottlenecks such as troublesome vendors. Not to mention, she couldn’t create a compliant audit trail which posed challenges when it came to compliance.  

With Xelix’s end-to-end automation for reconciling supplier statements, Saint Luke’s Health’s Accounts Payable team reconciles more statements than before in a fraction of the time. Gone are the days of a heavily manual process involving physical paper.  
 
Now Saint Luke’s Health works from one system, Mia can track her team’s productivity, spot training gaps and assess performance for conversations around promotions. With more visibility, she can also evenly distribute tasks to her team.  

“Centralising is a really hard process for businesses – people like to work out of their own personal email inboxes. Xelix is one, centralised system that makes it easier for my team to stay on top of their work, and it makes it easier for me to analyse trends.”  

Cost savings by way of overpayment prevention are important for any business. But Mia also notices the return on investment that comes from automating manual tasks and driving process improvement.  

“ROI [also] has to do with preventive measures like training the team, fixing the issues [and] looking for trends ... there’s a lot of money spent on those things that people just don’t realise. I’ve done a lot of cost analysis on how long it takes to enter things or how long it takes us to reconcile statements. In my mind, there’s no question there's been immediate return on investment for automating those things with Xelix.”