How to prevent duplicate Invoices and Manual Payments in AP. What about Automatic Payments?
If you wish to prevent duplicate invoices and checks from being entered in the AP system, there are several settings available to accomplish that.
First, the AP Constants in P0000 can be set to display either a hard error or a warning if a duplicate invoice number is entered for the same vendor.
In Manual Payments with Voucher Match P0413M, a Processing Option setting controls whether a user will see a warning or an error on duplicate payment number.
In Manual Payments without Voucher Match P0411, a similar Processing Option exists as in P0413M.
It seems that only the Automatic Payment processing lacks the functionality to prevent duplicate payments. Let’s walk through a scenario how this might occur.
Here is a latest list of checks that exists in the system:
| Doc Type | Doc# |
| PK | 2001 |
| PK | 2002 |
| PK | 2003 |
| PK | 2004 |
The next check number is 2005.
- User performs a check run via Create Payment Control Groups
- 3 checks make it into the group
- User performs a Write
- Checks get assigned numbers 2005, 2006, 2007. They also get printed
- User decides to perform a Reset or an Undo. System asks the user what the next number should be
- Here is the breakdown: instead of entering 2005, user accidentally enters 2002 and the system lets him do it
- User performs another Write
- Checks get assigned numbers 2002, 2003, 2004. These numbers already exist, but the system duplicates them anyway
Since the system allows for this to happen, a strict AP user procedure should be developed to minimize the above scenario from occurring. An easy solution is to create a custom grid on the P0413M application and sort it by check# in descending order. Users will then see at a glance what the last payment number was
