u/Similar-Candle1087

A bookkeeper I was talking to told me about the time her company paid the same invoice twice. The vendor had sent it once by email and once by mail, both got entered, both got paid, and nobody noticed until the vendor flagged the overpayment weeks later. A few thousand dollars out the door, then the awkward clawback.

What stuck with me is there was no real safety net. QBO doesn't wave a flag that says "hey, you might've already paid this one." It just relies on a human catching it, and when invoices come in from five different places, humans miss it.

Has this happened to anyone here? How do you catch duplicates before they go out some system, a second set of eyes, or do you mostly find out after the money's already gone?

Was talking to a bookkeeper recently and she told me about a bill of couple thousand bucks, already paid and weeks later the owner asks her who approved it. she genuinely couldn't say. Someone had said "yeah, pay it" at some point, no email, no note, nothing. She lost an afternoon, scrolling through messages trying to piece it back together. The bit that stuck with me was that QBO has the bill and the payment, but not the "who signed off, and when" part. So everyone bolts on their own thing a forwarded email, a Slack ping, a verbal yes that lives nowhere.

How do you all handle it? And has the "who approved this?" thing ever actually bitten you?