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Warning: That vendor audit tool I used flagged our own team in error and it was a mess
I was at a supply chain meetup in Denver last month when a guy from a mid-size logistics firm told me his team ran a compliance audit using this new automated tool. It flagged 12 of his own employees' receipts as suspicious because of a date format mismatch in the system. Took them two weeks and 40 hours of manual review to clear everyone. Has anyone else seen these tools cause more problems than they solve?
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emeryfox9d ago
At a local procurement roundtable in Austin someone mentioned their vendor audit tool flagged perfectly fine invoices because the system couldn't handle tax ID numbers formatted with dashes vs without. Their compliance guy spent a whole weekend going through 60 flagged transactions only to find zero actual issues. That date format problem you mentioned sounds like the same kind of dumb edge case these tools never catch during setup. It's frustrating because the sales demos make it look so smooth but real data always has weird quirks. Honestly feels like we're trading one type of manual work for another with these automated audit tools.
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clark.iris9d ago
@emeryfox yeah you're spot on about trading one type of manual work for another. It's like when I switched to a smart thermostat and it kept turning my heat off because it thought I was away when I was just sitting still reading. These tools have a pattern of making simple things complicated but calling it efficient.
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