Continuous Contract Enforcement vs. AP Recovery Audits for Manufacturers

Why traditional AP recovery audits miss ongoing margin leakage and how continuous vendor contract enforcement prevents it. Comparison guide for mid-market manufacturers.

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Continuous Contract Enforcement vs. AP Recovery Audits for Manufacturers
If you are a CFO or controller at a US manufacturer in the $30 to $150 million revenue range and you suspect your vendors are not billing according to contract terms, you have historically had two options. You could hire a recovery audit firm to examine past payments and recover overpayments. Or you could accept the leakage as a cost of doing business and focus on other priorities. Neither option solves the underlying problem permanently. Recovery audits look backward. They identify what went wrong over the past 12 to 36 months, recover a portion of the overpayments, and recommend process improvements. Then they leave. The structural causes of the leakage remain — the missing GRN, the PDF-trapped contracts, the vendor billing defaults. Twelve months later, the leakage has rebuilt to approximately the same level. Continuous contract enforcement is a fundamentally different approach. Instead of examining past payments to recover losses, it matches every new invoice against every applicable contract term before payment is approved. It prevents margin drift rather than recovering it. And it operates permanently, not as a periodic engagement. This guide compares both approaches honestly so you can decide which model — or which combination — fits your situation.

Margin Drift Resources