Don’t discount a forensic audit for all your customers

At Salitix we know that conducting a review outside of the big five or six Retailers can be difficult or perceived as not worth doing because trading volumes are smaller and therefore promotional funding values less (and suppliers tend to get less audit claims from these customers??). There is also the challenge that if a retailer has revenues of less than £1 billion, then they are not subject to GSCOP and this can add significant friction when trying to get historic claims submitted, let alone paid.

But a good forensic auditor can still build a rich trading picture using limited data resources. Recently Ollie Ansell has been able to utilise an email archive to identify specific trading agreements, the dialogue between the trading partners about what was agreed, and finally what was paid in relation to these. By looking at what was paid and then what was discussed over a trading period on the email archive, Ollie was able to show that a growth payment was made based on an assumption that the trigger for it was met, when in fact it had not been. The result, a 10K overpayment by our client. This may sound like pocket change in the overall scheme of things, until you consider that the total investment in this instance was around 200K, i.e. the error was around 5% of total investment due!

If you have a range of trading relationships with a variety of retailers where you have growth overriders, or JBP arrangements, particularly where the relationship falls outside of GSCOP regulation, then it’s worth remembering that you can forensically reconcile this trading going back seven years.

The results might pleasantly surprise you.