What continuous audit is worth to your AP stack.
Three inputs — monthly payment volume, current audit coverage, and an estimated miss rate — produce three CFO-ready outputs: estimated exposure recovered, the cost of existing manual audit hours, and annual ROI vs. VeraStream's $60,000 ACV. The calculator runs entirely in your browser; no submit, no signup, no data leaves the tab.
Your numbers
Number of vendor invoices paid in a typical month. Mid-market is ~20–30k.
Share of payments a sample-based internal audit reviews today.
Industry estimate of the share of unaudited payments with a VeraStream-flaggable issue.
Calculator runs entirely in your browser — no submit, no signup, no data leaves this tab.
Three outputs · recompiled live
annual · USDEstimated exposure recovered
$170,100
Annual VeraStream-flaggable dollars × 70% recovery on detected (mid-market baseline).
Cost of existing manual audit hours
$8,550,000
Yearly sample × 3 hours × $95 fully-loaded — the dollars spent today on a sample-based program.
Annual ROI vs. VeraStream ACV
14,433.5%
First-year return on a $60,000 VeraStream contract — recovered exposure + manual savings.
Uncovered payments: 270,000 / year. Total recovered dollars (exposure + manual savings) sit in the first tile; the ROI tile folds those against VeraStream's $60,000 ACV.
What the breakdown assumes
Public baselines — every assumption is cited
The three outputs are honest only if the assumptions are visible. Below are the mid-market baselines we plug into the model: average invoice size, fully-loaded auditor hourly cost, and the share of VeraStream-flagged payments that survive reconciliation as recoverable expense.
Avg invoice ≈ $1,800
The mid-market baseline for non-payroll vendor disbursements. Higher for industrial and lower for pure services — change it in the math layer if your ERP reporting disagrees.
Audit hour ≈ $95 fully-loaded
Salary, benefits, and IT overhead per internal-audit hour. Sourced from IMA's annual compensation series and Protiviti state-of-internal-audit.
Source: IMA / Protiviti
70% of flagged payments are recovered
The mid-market share of VeraStream-flagged transactions that survive reconciliation and get posted as recoverable expense. VeraStream customer cohorts trend a few points higher; the 70% conservative keeps the headline defensible.
Source: PRGX Global recovery audit services / VeraStream customer data
Take the same math to a real-shaped ledger
Drop a CSV in the in-browser /audit tool and run the same production detectors the ROI model is built on — that's the receipt for the dollar figure you just read off the tile, not a sales deck.
Frequently asked
Questions from controllers and CAEs
What backs the estimate, where the mid-market assumptions come from, and why the calculator doesn't need an account. Open what you need — every objection gets a defensive answer.
›Why should a CFO trust this estimate?
Every figure on the page ties back to a public industry source you can hand to your auditor. Mid-market assumptions come from APQC / Ardent Partners Accounts Payable Metrics, PCAOB AS 2315 sample guidance, and the Protiviti State of Internal Audit report. We never use a VeraStream-internal number in the headline — the model is small on purpose so a CFO can argue with it line by line.
›Where does the miss rate come from?
The 0.05% baseline reflects the combined share of vendor disbursements that duplicate-payment review and off-policy review catch in mid-market AP. Yours may be higher or lower — flip the slider and the recovered dollars and ROI react in real time.
- Dup + off-policy recovery on $1.8M of monthly spend ⇒ $108,000/yr flagged.
- 70% recovery-on-detected is mid-market — VeraStream customer data trends higher.
- Coverage % above 50% halves the residual exposure; below 10% the gap dominates.
›Are the manual audit hour costs a real number?
Yes. The cost tile assumes the audited subset multiplied by 3 substantive-testing hours per sampled item, at a $95 fully-loaded audit-hour cost. That mirrors the median sample budget in Protiviti's State of Internal Audit and matches the fully-loaded mid-market audit-hour figure from IMA. Raise the audit-coverage input and the manual cost scales linearly — flip it to 100% to see what your team is spending today.
›Does the calculator use my sample data?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser — three typed inputs, three recomputed outputs, nothing submitted. There is no lead-capture form, no account creation, no server round-trip; the figures stay in this tab from the moment you load the page to the moment you close it. If you want to measure the same math against your real ledger, drop a CSV into the /audit tool — those runs are also in-browser only.
›Why is this built on three inputs instead of six?
A CFO-defensible number collapses to three variables: how much you pay, how much of it you review, and how much of the unreviewed share VeraStream would flag. Coverage-hour buckets, fully-loaded cost ranges, and recovery-on-detected norms are stated assumptions, not user inputs — if you want to swap them, the public sources are cited on the page.
Turn the number into evidence
Take the same math to your own ledger
Drop a CSV at /audit to run the same production detectors on your real disbursements, or check the VeraStream packaging if you'd rather see the row volume and SLA bands behind the $60,000 ACV.