The client

Bernicia have been providing quality homes and services to people in the North East for over 50 years, earning a reputation as one of the country’s leading housing providers. Building, renting, selling and managing homes and providing specialist support services to over 60,000 customers and 14,000 properties. Providing services for single people, couples, families and older people, and care and support services for those with additional support requirements.

With plans to invest £140m in both existing and new homes across a spectrum of types and tenures. All of which makes a positive difference to people’s lives. Bernicia are unashamedly performance driven and employ confident, proud and passionate people to achieve ambitions – The Bernicia Way.

The requirement

Recognising that a Multi Year annual Accounts Payable review would identify any over-payments, deliver potential cash recoveries completely risk free as well as independently validating AP systems and processes are working well on a regular basis. Rockford Associates were identified as the best solution provider for an annual Accounts Payable review.

The solution

As part of a multi-year annual audit agreement Rockford Associates reviewed five years of data, extracting AP transaction data directly from the Sun Systems transaction data. The process was simple and straight forward as no scripting or software development was required. The data was uploaded to Rockford’s secure share file site, then processed via its bespoke data mining software “Pathfinder”.
With access to mail, systems and scanning in place Rockford’s auditor identified, verified and recovered a number of over-payments by conducting a seamless statement review whilst concurrently analysing Rockford AP Analytic reports.

The results

In total 334,000 transactions over the five-year period were analysed, 99.99% of transactions by volume and 99.99% by value were correctly processed. Of the transactions reviewed 37 over-payments were identified, resulting in a five-figure cash sum recovery.
In addition to the recoveries Bernicia welcomed Rockford’s independent validation and
positive reassurance that their internal controls and duplicate software processes were operating effectively and clearly within the parameters of a well-managed organisation