back to listings SME Profile: Madison Castle Associates Ltd
Madison Castle Associates Ltd
Unit S, The Maltings, Station Road, Sawbridgeworth, Herts, CM21 9JX
T: 0843 289 1178 E: info@madisoncastle.com W: http://madisoncastle.com
Welcome to Madison Castle Associates
Madison Castle Associates have found lost profits in the form of overpayments to suppliers, for UK and Europe's leading organisations.
Our client list includes some of the largest UK businesses as well as non-profit and public sector organisations. Our unique routines for identifying supplier overpayments and undercharges are what makes us industry leaders. The fact that data capture is never an issue for any client - as we have developed a process that means the amount of IT input from your business is kept to a minimum - is what makes us the most respected in the industry. Add to this outstanding customer service and support in the form of reports to close loopholes; support and training to run our routines in-house; data cleansing and that proves we are the best in the industry.
100% of our clients remain with us and we are dedicated to them. That must be the best testimonial of any company.
AUDIT SERVICES
The standard purchase audit conducted by every other purchase audit company will focus on:
- Duplicate payments
- Wrong vendor paid
- Copy invoices paid
- VAT errors
- Statement review
Our reviews go deeper and wider so therefore we recover more money for our clients. For instance, most purchase auditors apply the 80/20 rule - they will find 80% of the overpayments for 20% of the effort. We believe this is not a full service for the client.
Our methodology is about ensuring we have recovered a minimum of 95% of all possible overpayments. After all, it is your money and it should be in your bank account. The other 5%? There comes a point where economic recovery becomes inefficient, so we can either stop or pass the reports to you so that you can decide the best economic way to recover the remaining very small amounts and few numbers of overpayments.
This seemingly straight forward audit is both complex and commercially important to all businesses. The foundation of all businesses relationships are contractual and yet most clauses in any agreement are rarely remembered or reviewed. In our experience up to 60% of all recoveries will result from a supplier billing for goods or services that do not comply with the business terms that were agreed.
Areas where we uncover issues are generally one of the following:
- Rebates not taken or actioned correctly
- Cut offs when rebates are applied
- Additions to contracts always get added by the supplier, but deductions or reductions are not always actioned and are sometimes forgotten
- Offices / plants closing but contracts not amended
- Payment terms not applied correctly
This review is a vital part of any audit and its importance must not be underestimated. Our staff specialise in this review and know exactly what to look for when reviewing contracts.
This area of review can deliver some exceptional benefits to the client. We look not only at the current contracts, but also compare tariffs to ensure future costs are reduced and benefits achieved in the current financial year. We review all aspects of telephony, including mobile phones, landlines and data.
A typical review will uncover:
- Overcharges where contracts have rebates not applied correctly
- Periods where telephony was not available due to provider fault and rebates/compensation is due
- Usage that is not permitted by employee
- Erroneous charges
Tariff comparison is a vital part of this review as many of the best offers for businesses are not disclosed on comparison web sites. Our unique knowledge in this area ensures you are on the best tariff both now and in the future.
This review can become involved as we would review all property associated costs such as:
- Rates
- Rents
- Repairs
- Service charges
- Utilities
- Sub-tenancies
Our service looks at your historical spend to see if you have overpaid due physical issues to temporary or permanent store/office closures; suffered disruption to your business due to road works or diversions. Together with looking at legal aspects such as transitional phasing or exemptions. Our auditors have many years of experience when dealing with property audits and local government bodies. Rate reliefs based upon Eu Directives and SBRR are areas where we excel. Once the historical review has been completed, we then look to the future and look for savings to be achieved by negotiating the rating valuations with the local rating valuation dept. This approach will substantially increase your profitability and ensure your property portfolio is maintained and up to date.
We are in partnership with a company that specialises in sustainability. Becoming more sustainable actual increases the bottom line profits by achieving a minimum of 10% reductions in:
- Wastage of materials
- Electricity
- Water
- Gas
- Oil
- Company car usage
The additional benefits to this process include using cloud technology for system storage and access. This means that by capturing the data at source e.g. water, then the need for many disparate spreadsheets is reduced and means that all staff can access the data once.
Fraud - and particularly employee fraud - is on the increase year on year. It's a fact that most fraud goes undetected as fraudsters - in this case employees and suppliers - know the business systems and procedures and also know where the opportunities exist. Also most businesses have to balance efficiency with control and all too often efficiency wins at the cost of weaker controls.
We are industry leaders in this field and and we have uncovered frauds for our clients by using two vital ingredients that separate us from our competitors
- We employ ex-fraud squad / fraud office investigators
- We have developed almost 60 different routines to uncover a fraudster
We look for buyer/supplier collusion as well as an individual working alone. We have uncovered banks accounts where suppliers have been told to pay funds which are not the business accounts. We assisted a client identify an individual who was threatening a CEO of a major retailer with bodily harm. The CEO did not want to go to the police as it would become public knowledge. We identified a senior finance employee had raised invoices and diverted cash into his bank account.
