$847K in Duplicate Payments Caught in Year One

briq Customer Success · Enterprise Accounts · Dec 2025

How AI-powered invoice matching uncovered nearly a million dollars in duplicate payments across 23 active projects.

A heavy civil contractor running 23 active projects across 3 states discovered a costly problem: duplicate invoice payments were slipping through their manual review process at an alarming rate.

The issue wasn't negligence. With hundreds of invoices flowing in weekly from dozens of subcontractors and suppliers — many in non-standard formats — the AP team simply couldn't catch every duplicate. Slight variations in invoice numbers, different date formats, and partial deliveries made matching difficult.

Otto's invoice intelligence was deployed to process every incoming invoice before it entered the approval workflow. The system compares new invoices against the full payment history — not just exact matches, but fuzzy matches that catch resubmissions with slightly different formatting.

In the first 12 months, Otto flagged $847,000 in potential duplicate payments. After AP review, $812,000 of those were confirmed duplicates that would have been paid without intervention.

The ROI calculation was straightforward: the annual cost of the briq platform was recovered in the first 6 weeks of duplicate detection alone.

Beyond the direct savings, the contractor reported a significant improvement in subcontractor relationship management — fewer payment disputes, faster resolution of legitimate billing questions, and better visibility into payment patterns.