Table of contents
Clients aren't always aware of the steps available to help mitigate risk as they pay bills and spend money. Here's a checklist to help them determine if their AP process is putting their businesses at greater risk for fraud.
Common bill pay fraud and scams
Red flags for bill pay fraud
- Using paper checks: Paper checks contain all the information fraudsters need to steal a client’s money. Paper limits transparency, can be easily manipulated, stolen, or destroyed, and often slows down critical processes.
- No defined AP workflows: Paper isn’t the only place fraud happens. Business email compromise attacks use email systems to impersonate someone from within. If a clearly defined workflow with user roles isn’t established and followed, the business leaves itself open to potential threats.
- Sharing banking account login information: When clients share confidential information such as banking logins, every person they give it to has access to a company's entire account. This makes sharing the password risky. Plus, the password needs to be changed if someone with it leaves the business.
- Ignoring fraud prevention tools: Mitigating risk isn’t a manual process. Something is bound to be left behind. Clients should be aware of the tools that can help.
Bill pay checklist
Check items off your bill paying checklist with AP automation
The good news is that an automated AP workflow can help with fraud prevention. Here are a few ways BILL’s AP workflow enables you to mitigate risk of fraud:
- Digital payment methods: Automation platforms, like BILL Accounts Payable, use online security measures to protect crucial banking information. Payments can be sent and approved digitally—reducing the risk of someone else manipulating, stealing, or destroying the checks—and all records are kept through your banking or payments system ledger. BILL protects your banking information by keeping your payment processing in-house instead of employing third-party services. This allows you to mask your banking information while giving you more control.
- Approval workflows: An automation platform such as BILL can clearly define and enforce steps and user roles in the approval process. This mitigates the potential for a threat from outside of that workflow and can help isolate risky steps in the process for improvement.
- Separation of duties: Not everyone needs every job. Individual logins with varying permissions for each role will reduce the number of people with access to a company’s money and confidential information. Nobody needs to share passwords—everyone who should have access has their own account.
- An audit trail: Automated AP platforms with features such as user accountability, reconstruction of events, or litigation support help minimize problems that slip through the cracks so that they can be resolved and prevented from happening again.
