Missing credits and duplicate payments are cash already sitting in your supply chain. A credit note gets raised but never claimed. An invoice gets paid twice because nobody saw it had already cleared. Statement reconciliation catches both by comparing the supplier's own statement against your ledger, line by line.
For the full picture of how that comparison runs, see our guide to supplier statement reconciliation.
UK and US businesses lose up to $53 billion a year to duplicate payments, missing credits and invoicing errors, an average of 0.35% of annual spend. (Xelix, 2026)
That's not a rounding error. On $1 billion of spend, 0.35% is $3.5 million sitting in the wrong place, some of it paid out twice, some of it owed back and never claimed. Independent research covering 481 million invoices puts a number on what most finance teams suspect but rarely quantify: there's real cash sitting in the supply chain, and most of it never gets found.
Two different kinds of leakage
Duplicate payments and missing credits move money in opposite directions, but both come from the same root cause: nobody is checking the supplier's statement against the ledger closely enough, or often enough, to catch them.
A duplicate payment is money that's already gone out twice for the same invoice. A missing credit is money that's never come back, a credit note the supplier issued that was never applied against your account. One shows up as an overpayment. The other shows up as an underclaim. Reconciliation catches both because it compares the full picture, not just individual transactions.
Why duplicate payments get through, even with controls in place
Most duplicate-payment controls check for an exact match: same invoice number, same amount. Suppliers don't always cooperate with that logic. An invoice gets resubmitted under a slightly different reference. A credit memo gets issued against the wrong invoice number. A second contact at the same supplier re-sends something already paid. None of these trip an exact-match rule, but all of them show up the moment a supplier's statement gets reconciled against the ledger line by line.
Why credit notes go unclaimed
A credit note has to be matched to a specific invoice, or deducted from a future payment, before it actually reduces what you owe. That step gets missed constantly in a manual process, because tracking it through to completion isn't anyone's single job. It sits as an open item on both ledgers until someone goes looking for it, and in a lot of AP teams, nobody does. Across the suppliers we see, the average value of unclaimed credits per account runs to around £13k, cash that a manual process would likely never surface. Our breakdown of common statement reconciliation problems covers this gap in more detail.
What the leakage looks like by sector
The same research breaks the loss down by industry, measuring duplicate payments and missing credit notes as a share of annual invoice volume:
| Sector | Duplicate payments | Missing credit notes |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing & packaging | 0.66% | 0.06% |
| Healthcare | 0.38% | 0.14% |
| Pharmaceuticals | 0.42% | 0.03% |
| Retail & consumer goods | 0.27% | 0.17% |
| Energy & utilities | 0.28% | 0.02% |
Recovery audit firms that specialise in finding this kind of leakage typically charge 15% to 25% of whatever they recover, a fee worth paying once, but not a substitute for a reconciliation process that catches the leakage before the money leaves in the first place.
How reconciliation gets the cash back
Statement reconciliation doesn't claw back a duplicate payment automatically, that still needs a recovery conversation with the supplier. What it does is surface the discrepancy while it's still recoverable, rather than months later when the paper trail has gone cold. Run reconciliation on a regular cycle rather than only at month-end, and most of this leakage gets caught before it compounds. See our guide to how supplier statement matching works for the mechanics.
