How General Mills Puts Cash on the Table with AP Reviews

Overview

General Mills, a global food leader with complex operations and high transaction volumes, partnered with apexanalytix to strengthen its accounts payable strategy and unlock additional working capital. With a strong foundation of internal controls already in place, the company sought to further refine its processes, reduce financial leakage, and ensure no value was left behind.

By combining internal expertise with apexanalytix recovery audit capabilities, General Mills built a layered approach to AP oversight that delivers continuous insight, control, and measurable financial impact.

Challenge

Operating at scale, General Mills manages a high volume of supplier transactions across a dynamic business environment. Ongoing changes in systems, processes, and supplier relationships created persistent risk for payment errors.

Even with strong controls, key challenges remained:

• Complex, evolving processes that increased the risk of duplicate payments and missed credits
• Limited visibility into errors that bypass existing controls
• The need to continuously refine SAP and internal controls to keep pace with change
• Pressure to maximize working capital, even when error rates are already low

Because of its disciplined AP processes, General Mills’ recovery rates were already well below industry averages. However, this also meant that remaining errors were harder to detect and required more advanced, layered approaches to uncover.

Solution

General Mills implemented a multi-layered strategy that combines internal controls with external recovery expertise from apexanalytix.

This approach includes:

• Ongoing SAP optimization to proactively catch duplicate payments at the source
• Internal AP reviews as a secondary validation layer to reinforce control accuracy
• A 90-day rolling statement audit by apexanalytix to continuously identify missed credits and discrepancies
• An annual duplicate payment analysis to uncover issues that may have slipped through internal controls
• Advanced analytics and root cause insights to strengthen processes and prevent future errors

This structured, continuous approach ensures that even low-frequency errors are identified, recovered, and used to improve upstream processes.

Results

Despite already performing below industry averages for payment errors, General Mills continues to realize meaningful financial returns through its partnership with apexanalytix.

From an accounts payable recovery audit:

• Nearly $500,000 recovered in duplicate payments

• $1.75 million recovered through statement audits

• Over $2 million in total recoveries returned to the business

Beyond the financial impact, General Mills achieved:

• Improved visibility into control gaps and process inefficiencies
• Stronger, continuously refined AP controls within SAP and internal workflows
• A proactive, layered defense against financial leakage
• Ongoing working capital optimization, even in a low-error environment

Watch the webinar

Speakers

• Mark Brousseau, President at Brousseau & Associates
• Jeff Heinrich, Senior Process Specialist – Accounts Payable and Expense Reporting, General Mills
• Phil Beane, SVP – Global Field Operations at apexanalytix

Listen to the interview with Jeff to learn:

• The four-step process to identify duplicate payments and statement credits
• The business case for an objective third-party rolling statement review versus adding headcount for an internal recovery audit
• Common reasons for duplicate and statement recoveries (e.g., no PO, unidentified volume rebates, return credits)
• Expansion of the AP review to other countries and why
• How feedback from the audit is great training material for their AP processing team