When vendor invoices sit in the wrong fund

Related programmes often share vendors. Over time, invoices for Fund A land in Fund B because the same staff member codes both. Sampling that only looks inside one fund will miss the reverse error — money that should have been charged here but was not.

A simple cross-check

When the population is small, compare a vendor’s annual payments across adjacent funds. When it is large, ask for a vendor extract filtered to the review period and scan for known shared suppliers. Neither step is glamorous; both catch coding drift before a donor asks.

What we write for trustees

We describe the invoice, the fund that paid, the fund that should have paid, and whether reallocation is still possible inside the reporting window. We avoid implying intent unless evidence supports it.