FISCAL Case Studies.

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Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust: Case Study

Guy’s and St. Thomas’ NHS Trust had over 360,000 annual supplier invoices that were being manually checked. They wanted to secure their payments process against irregularities and chose FISCAL to help – to date, they have achieved over 1000% ROI!

Introduction

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (GSTT) comprises two of London’s best-known teaching hospitals, Guy’s Hospital and St Thomas’ Hospital. It is home to the Evelina London Children’s Hospital and provides community services in Lambeth and Southwark. Collectively, they form one of the largest and most successful Foundation Trusts in the UK, with an annual turnover of £1.6 billion and providing 2.6 million patient contacts a year.

Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust achieves 1000% ROI with FISCAL’s software.
Details

Across the NHS, there is a constant need to identify new opportunities for cost savings and process improvements to ensure maximum funds are available for patient care. This requires NHS Trusts to identify supplier payment irregularities. But like most Trusts, GSTT’s existing controls for supplier invoices were manual and time consuming.

The Accounts Payable (AP) team processes 30,000 invoices processed per month, of which 55% are received electronically. The rest are paper based, with the AP team manually entering these into their system.

With this volume of invoices and manual processing, the team’s reactive checks were no longer adequate. Internal audits had confirmed that some AP processes were inefficient and the Trust was making incorrect payments. It needed a new solution that:
• Identifies all erroneous payments
• Proactively checks payments before they are made, to avoid working capital leaving the Trust only to be recovered sometime later

Solution

The Trust’s Chief Accountant and AP Manager engaged FISCAL Technologies to conduct a Risk Review, in which a sample of AP transactions are run through FISCAL’s forensic solution, identifying highrisk transactions and other potential areas of risk. Supplier payments were proactively checked before being issued.

The Risk Review uncovered sufficient duplicate payments that, when recovered, would make the solution self-funding for the initial 3-year service agreement. By using the Trust’s actual data, the Risk Review demonstrated, with a high degree of accuracy, the latent value that would be unlocked with FISCAL’s solution.

With the business case established, the Trust decided to move away from retrospective auditing to continuous, preventative control. FISCAL’s Forensics solution was fully implemented to identify transactions that have a high-risk of being fraudulent, incorrect or in breach of compliance, and alert the AP team prior to payments being made

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