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I never would have thought of this, a very useful article, you have to be so careful these days.
Another option would be to download the invoice from the suppliers site/portal rather than opening an attachment
I never would have thought of this, a very useful article, you have to be so careful these days.
Another option would be to download the invoice from the suppliers site/portal rather than opening an attachment
It is time consuming having to log into every supplier portal, remember the password and navigate the site to try and find the invoice. Multiply that by several invoices and it is sucking up a lot of time. There must be a better solution.
A potential solution is 'secure sharing' where a supplier emails a secure link which leads to a secure website where the invoice is hosted. We are working on such a solution for some of our clients at the moment.
Another option to solve this problem is to securely share the invoice through a portal such as MyDocSafe. If an invoice has to be emailed, it could be digitally signed first. The recipient can then check the authenticity of the signature to make sure that the contents of the emailed file has not been compromised.
We had exactly this situation - a customer's email was hacked and an email we sent was altered. Only discovered when we chased for payment they thought they had already paid.
Customer lost several thousand £.
To show how you cannot be too careful these days, have a read of this recent disturbing case of a brazen £1m property fraud that cost the poor defrauded buyer £1m .
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2016/2276.html
It's hard to see what could have been done differently by the buyer in that case.
To show how you cannot be too careful these days, have a read of this recent disturbing case of a brazen £1m property fraud that cost the poor defrauded buyer £1m .
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2016/2276.html
It's hard to see what could have been done differently by the buyer in that case.
A very interesting and rather terrifying case. The fraud appears to have been 100% successful. The fraudulent seller seems to have got away with the money and the defrauded purchaser had no recourse and lost £1m plus legal costs which for a 5 day case involving several QCs must have been in six figures. It makes one wonder whether purchasers of properties ought to insist on seeing the same identity documents as the sellers' solicitors in cases where they have had no contact with the seller and therefore no opportunity to make common sense checks that the person claiming to sell the property is in fact the true owner.
Just spoken to a supplier who asked us why we didn't check his invoice when the BACS payment bounced back and maybe this answers his question. Surprisingly, my new company insists on paying suppliers by cheque on large amounts just to counter such a situation knowing the cheque can only be banked by the intended recipient.
Maybe the old fashioned ways aren't so bad...
Good article Tom. We also encourage our users to turn on reference data audit for Creditors so any changes to bank account or payment terms are tracked and checked prior to running a payment process.
Another solution is to automate invoice fetching. There are several software that have this feature. Few month ago I started to use www.getmyinvoices.com. This is cloud based software allows to automatically collect, find and transfer incoming invoices to other bookkeeping services. It protects from invoice scam and takes that whole mess away and keeps finance happy with me!