Today’s  question is courtesy of our eCredit software team.  The chart below is based on a review of over 10 million customer-initiated invoice disputes logged by users of the eCredit system in the last 12 months.  (total value of these cases is just under $21.7B)

While it is possible that the significant increase in dispute cases in Q3 and Q4 of 2008 is unrelated to the overall economic slowdown, the data raises some interesting questions:

• Did companies actively use disputes as a way to manage cash during a critical period? or

• As the economy tightened up, did firms raise the level of due diligence, thus discovering more disputable errors?