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The boring $1M-per-$1B business: Getting paid to find money companies don’t know they lost.
Here’s the number that makes this business exist: for roughly every $1 billion a large company spends paying vendors and suppliers, about $1 million of that spend is a mistake. Not fraud. Not theft.
Just normal operational sloppiness at scale.
Duplicate payments.
Invoices paid twice because two systems didn’t talk to each other.
Early-payment discounts nobody claimed.
Rebates a vendor owed but never sent.
Pricing errors that went uncaught for years.
A company with $5 billion in annual vendor spend is realistically sitting on $5 million or more that’s already theirs, sitting in a supplier’s account instead of their own, and their own finance team has no idea it’s there.
There’s an entire industry built on finding it for them. It’s called recovery auditing, or AP recovery auditing.
One firm doing this, PRGX, is publicly traded, so you can actually go check their numbers instead of taking an operator’s word for it. Underneath the big player there are dozens of smaller shops doing the exact same thing for mid-size companies that PRGX doesn’t bother chasing.
The pitch to a client is almost embarrassingly easy: we find money you already own, you pay us nothing unless we find it, and even then you only pay a slice of what we recovered. It’s a genuinely no-risk sell, which is exactly why the client-acquisition side of this business is less brutal than most B2B services.
That’s the free version of the story. Here’s what actually matters if you’re building it.
Inside, we get into:
How does the audit actually work, step by step, from getting the client’s data to getting paid?
What skills do you actually need, and what can you just hire out from day one?
Where do you find your first client when you have zero track record?
What do you actually say to a CFO to get a yes in one meeting?
How much do recovery auditors really charge, and what’s the real math on a $150 million client versus a $500 million one?
What does year one actually look like versus year three, in real dollars?
Where does this business quietly fall apart, and what do new operators always get wrong?
Does this work the same way outside the US, or is the opportunity actually better elsewhere?