Nick Johnson, CEO of Waste Experts, shares his findings with this Invoice Errors report.

At Waste Experts, we tell our clients that we review every single invoice that comes into the office, and we do. Recently we decided to dig into our invoice error logs to see what kind of data we could extrapolate from them. We reviewed August of 2013 to August of 2016.

What we found was not all that surprising to us, but it may be to the average customer. Here are some of the highlights of what we discovered:

• Over the past three years, Waste Experts invoice review services has prevented an average monthly price increase, in the aggregate, of $185,226.16 for our clients.
• This means that Waste Experts’ clients are saving an additional 2.2 million dollars in prevented annual price increases.
• Without the Waste Experts invoice review service, the average client would have experienced a 17% monthly increase in their trash, recycling, and medical waste disposal rates.
• Waste Experts invoice review services also secured our customers $164,323.26 in refunds from trash and medical waste haulers charging unauthorized fees.

This highlights a problem that we have been telling current, and potential, clients for years, which is that almost twenty-five percent of the trash, recycling, and medical waste invoices that we review on a monthly basis have some kind of error, or incorrect fee on them, and they are almost never in the customers favor. Unless you have a dedicated person that has access to all of your locations contractual pricing; and has the time to review every invoice, every month; AND has the time to follow up with each vendor to ensure that the invoice is correctly rolled back and corrected; then, sadly, you can expect to see an average monthly price increase of 17%.

For a large volume customer, with a monthly spend of $10,000 on trash and medical waste services this can equate to a monthly price increase of $1,700.00 and an annual increase of $20,400.00.

Some actions that can be taken to mitigate this are the following:

1. Centralize all of your contractual pricing information into one place.
2. Build a spreadsheet of all locations with contract pricing, and allowed rate increase in the out years.
3. Assign a staff member to compare all trash, recycling, and medical waste invoices, against current pricing, every month.
4. Assign a second staff member to follow up on any errors that are identified, and to ensure that the invoices are correctly rolled back and credited.

If you are concerned about the impact of invoice errors on your trash, recycling, and medical waste bottom line, then contact Waste Experts for a free complimentary review of your current pricing, and your current invoice rates.