Preventing AP Fraud and Duplicate Payments with Automated PO Matching

If you’ve ever had to explain to a vendor why they were paid twice—or worse, why they weren’t paid at all due to a fraud incident—you know the accounts payable process isn’t just about cutting checks. Between invoice overload, approval bottlenecks, and the growing risk of fraud, finance teams are under pressure to tighten their controls without slowing down the business.

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That’s why PO matching—once considered a nice-to-have—is now table stakes for any AP department trying to reduce risk and boost efficiency.

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AP Fraud Isn’t Hypothetical Anymore

The threat of accounts payable fraud has grown well beyond BEC emails and phishing attempts. In 2024, the Association for Financial Professionals found that 79% of organizations experienced attempted or actual payment fraud—a number that’s barely budged in the past five years.

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While checks remain the most common fraud vector, ACH debits and wire transfers are now targeted too, thanks to more sophisticated social engineering and vendor impersonation tactics.

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And fraud isn't always external. Insider threats, accidental approvals, and overpayments due to poor invoice tracking all add up to real financial damage. These problems are compounded when invoice volumes spike—something that happens fast as businesses scale or go through seasonal cycles.

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Then There’s the Duplicate Payment Problem

Fraud is flashy, but duplicate payments are the silent killer. According to research by Gartner and shared via CFO.com, duplicate payments can account for 0.8% to 2% of a company’s total AP disbursements.

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That might not sound like much—until you realize that for a business paying $50 million annually through AP, that’s $400,000 to $1 million in preventable losses. The worst part? Most teams don’t notice until a vendor calls or an audit rolls around.

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What causes it? A mix of manual data entry, poor invoice management, different invoice numbers for recurring charges, and missed coordination between teams. You’d be surprised how easy it is to pay the same vendor twice if your team is rushing or your system doesn’t flag issues early.

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How Automated PO Matching Solves Both

PO matching isn’t new—but what’s new is how much smarter, faster, and more accurate it’s become thanks to AI and machine learning.

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Let’s break it down:

Traditional 2- or 3-way matching means verifying that the invoice matches the purchase order and goods receipt (or services delivered).
Automated PO matching uses rules-based logic or AI to match documents without human review unless something seems off.
The system flags invoices that don’t match the PO, have discrepancies in quantity or price, or look like potential duplicates.

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The shift toward automation matters. Instead of relying on an AP specialist to manually compare fields in a spreadsheet or accounting system, the software does it instantly—and at scale. If you're handling hundreds or thousands of invoices a month, that adds up to massive time savings and far fewer errors.

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In fact, leading analysts like Ardent Partners highlight that AI-enabled AP automation dramatically reduces payment errors and helps finance teams proactively flag suspicious or duplicate invoices—before they result in costly mistakes. By removing manual checkpoints and enabling real-time validation, PO matching tools can stop duplicates from slipping through the cracks, even in high-volume environments.

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Real-World Example: Where Things Go Wrong Without Automation

Imagine this scenario: a recurring software vendor bills you monthly. The invoice layout is slightly different each month—one says “Consulting Services,” another says “Monthly Access.” Your AP clerk misses that both cover the same period, and both get routed for approval.

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Now add in late POs, multiple approvers, and a shared services team halfway across the country. If your system doesn’t flag the overlap, that vendor gets paid twice—and you might not realize until the next quarterly close. Worse, if the invoice was fraudulent, the money’s already gone.

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Now imagine an automated PO matching system that ingests the invoice, matches it to the open PO, detects a duplicate from last week with a similar amount and vendor ID, and routes it for exception review. That’s the difference between reactive damage control and proactive AP control.

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AI Makes PO Matching Smarter—Not Just Faster

Basic PO matching systems can automate simple tasks. But today’s best solutions use AI to go further:

Learn vendor patterns and detect inconsistencies that might indicate fraud.
Use OCR to extract data from emailed or PDF invoices—even when formatting varies.
Auto-correct common errors, like transposed numbers or missing PO references.
Flag anomalies in unit price, quantity, or tax fields based on historical norms.

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This means the system doesn’t just catch exact matches—it can spot when something almost matches and might be risky.

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AI also enables confidence scoring, where the system assigns a probability of a match being accurate. High-confidence matches go through automatically. Low-confidence ones trigger human review. That hybrid model—automated speed with human oversight where needed—is the gold standard for AP teams today.

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How This Helps Your Finance Team in 2025

CFOs are under more pressure than ever to reduce overhead, maintain compliance, and increase financial visibility. But doing that with outdated, manual AP processes is a losing game.

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Here’s what automated PO matching actually delivers:

Fewer errors: Reduce the number of invoices needing manual correction or re-processing.
Lower fraud risk: Catch anomalies earlier with fewer false positives.
Time savings: Free up your AP team to focus on higher-value tasks like vendor management or cash flow planning.
Faster month-end close: Accurate, coded, and reconciled invoices mean less cleanup later.

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And if your team is already stretched thin, this isn’t just nice to have—it’s necessary. You can’t scale a finance function if you're stuck chasing down duplicate payments and invoice typos.

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Final Thoughts

You don’t need a sprawling enterprise finance team to benefit from smarter controls. Mid-market companies, especially those using ERPs like NetSuite, Sage Intacct, or QuickBooks, can get huge value from automated PO matching—particularly when paired with robust invoice coding and approval workflows.

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If you’re still relying on email threads and spreadsheet workarounds, now’s the time to re-evaluate. Duplicate payments and fraud aren’t just expensive—they’re avoidable. Book a demo with Centime today to learn more.

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**Deposit placement through ICS is subject to the terms, conditions, and disclosures in the applicable agreements. Although deposits are placed in increments that do not exceed the FDIC standard maximum deposit insurance amount (“SMDIA”) at any one destination bank, a depositor’s balances at the institution that places deposits may exceed the SMDIA (e.g., before settlement for deposits or after settlement for withdrawals) or be uninsured (if the placing institution is not an insured bank). The depositor must make any necessary arrangements to protect such balances consistent with applicable law and must determine whether placement through ICS satisfies any restrictions on its deposits. A list identifying IntraFi network bank

Preventing AP Fraud and Duplicate Payments with Automated PO Matching

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