Capturing Your Runaway Expenses
Where are your lost resources hiding?
RAS finds them at no up-front cost to you!
RAS’ analytics identify lost resources
Insight into past business operations enables organizations to better manage financial resources and capture otherwise lost funds. With knowledge drawn from an organization’s abundant financial and operational data comes an opportunity to turn that information into actionable steps to increase the level of working capital.
The challenge is in compiling data, understanding it, and identifying valid recoveries for your organization. This is what we do! RAS tackles data challenges for its clients, using robust technology to analyze even terabytes of data in order to help you make better decisions and design more efficient and economical operations. Once you authorize your vendors to work with RAS, we conduct our work remotely through electronic means, safely out of your staff’s way.
Not a sample audit
When it comes to recovering lost money for clients, RAS analyzes 100% of external expenditures for potential errors. Our recovery analysis process involves numerous interrelated steps:
- Examining and depicting historical data through powerful algorithms
- Identifying all potential overcharges/overpayments
- Investigating each potential claim
- Documenting erroneous payments
- Recovering valid claims
- Reporting the cause of the overpayment
- Recommending steps to prevent future errors and to benefit from the data
Proven, accurate audit results
RAS performs an integrated audit of vendors’ financial transactions with your organization, combining features of both an operational and a performance audit. The audit provides a multi-layered, structured review of specific financial transactions to identify opportunities for cost recovery. RAS then issues an independent evaluation on vendor accuracy and recommends process improvements to prevent similar errors going forward.
Build a foundation for the future
We provide the following full suite of critical audits to provide you with new insight into your organization. These audits are invaluable planning tools to help you maximize your financial resources and thereby increase your working capital.
Accounts Payable
RAS’ state-of-the-art proprietary software and our experienced team of experts provide maximum recovery, and assurance of vendor compliance. Our thorough AP recovery audit service provides in-depth analysis of your outgoing payments, recovering payments mistakenly sent to and erroneously held by your vendors. RAS’ audit looks for a broad range of unintentional payments, documents those identified, and recovers the funds for your organization.
RAS also looks for other monies owed your organization, such as outstanding balances, missed discounts, and rebates. As with erroneous outgoing payments, RAS recovers these monies, identifies underlying causes of overlooked payments you are due and recommends process improvements to prevent future losses.
RAS does all the work, so you don’t have to. And you pay nothing up-front. RAS is compensated strictly on our performance for you. Once you receive the money RAS recovers…and only then…, do you pay RAS for its services from a portion of your savings. And, if RAS does not recover money, you pay nothing.
RAS Accounts Payable Keys to Success
Statement Audit
Are vendors holding credits that belong to you?
Many clients are unaware that they may be due significant outstanding credits that are instead sitting in vendors’ bank accounts. RAS can solve this problem for you through our statement investigation service.
RAS has recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single outstanding credit on numerous occasions. Frequently, the outstanding credit has been languishing undetected for many months—or even years.
Outstanding credits held by your vendors should match known credits recorded in your records (not theirs). We know from experience that is not always the case. RAS will uncover discrepancies, investigate the validity of each, and document each credit for your approval before recovering the funds for you.
Securing a statement of account from vendors is a labor-intensive process, but essential to restoring your otherwise lost funds. As a component of our comprehensive audit process, we document and recover open credits at no up-front cost to your organization. While it rarely ever happens. if we do not document and recover any outstanding credits on your behalf our statement audit services are free.
Recovery & Solutions Report
Upon completing our work, we prepare a comprehensive report documenting recovered cases and recommending actions you can take to optimize your financial processes.
Vendor Relations
RAS knows your vendors provide valuable goods and services vital to your organization’s operations. Maintaining excellent vendor relationships is critical to your organization and essential to our services. Building and maintaining positive vendor relations is a critical objective of our highly experienced statements investigations team. Sensitivity and professionalism are hallmarks of RAS’ work for our clients.
Sales & Use Tax Audit
RAS solves the problem of overpaid sales and use tax by deploying our robust algorithms to identify and document overpaid taxes on goods or services that either are exempt from sales and use tax or are non-taxable. Then, RAS works with the vendor to recover the overcharged taxes on your behalf.
We do all this with no up-front cost to you. If we do not recover money for you our service is free.
Why Organizations May Overpay Sales Tax
Most organizations do not have the personnel or specialized technology to perform detailed reviews of prior transactions. Their primary focus is on supporting current and future operations. As vendors want to avoid running afoul of a sales tax audit, they live by the motto: “When in doubt – tax it.” That covers them, but it means that you run the risk of being inappropriately charged taxes. Human error aside, many vendors have a challenging time keeping up with the various requirements that dictate whether or not to charge you taxes:
- Ever-changing state and local tax laws
- Taxable and non-taxable items being shipped together
- Tax Exempt Certificate not applied
RAS helps to ensure your organization is only being charged taxes you legitimately owe. We do this by reviewing:
- Taxes charged by vendors
- Self-accrued tax
- Intra-organization transfers and transactions
- Taxable sales
Adverse State Audit?
State auditors are looking for underpayments to the state, not overpayments by you. A detailed RAS review may result in reduction of your tax assessments.
RAS recovers overpaid taxes and identifies missed tax rebates
Overpaid taxes are often due to instances of misclassification or human error. For example, income of event planners is now taxable in some states. However, much of what event planners organize can be categorized as catering that provides food, which is not taxable.
Unclaimed Property
Unclaimed property consists of numerous types of intangible and tangible properties that have remained unclaimed by their rightful owner. With high volume transactions it is common for organizations to occasionally lose track of certain checks or bank holdings.
Our experienced financial professionals provide best-in-class services to review and recover your unclaimed property. Our claim process is meticulous, requiring complete adherence to claims protocols for validation and recovery.
Escheatment Services
Escheatment laws require assets, such as uncashed or returned check funds, which have been unclaimed for a prolonged time to be turned over to the state. Once escheated to the state, the state takes ownership of the asset. In collaboration with our unclaimed property services, we frequently can locate funds and return them to our client before they become transferred to the government.