Originally Ed Mehlman & Associates Formerly Enduring Retail Audit Now Mehlman & Co.
— Approach Mehlman & Co.

Recovery audit is not a commodity.
It is a craft.

A methodology forty years in the refining. Built by auditors who chose craft over scale — and never compromised.

The industry raced to the bottom.
We stayed at the top.

The industry has spent the last two decades racing to the bottom. Larger firms compete on volume — onboarding hundreds of clients, deploying generalist auditors across standardized scripts, offshoring correspondence to reduce cost. The work is shallow by design. Depth is not what they sell.

We chose the other path in 1984 and have never left it. Small teams. American-based experts. Custom tooling for every engagement. Long relationships with clients who value this.

Every decision we make is filtered through a single question: does this make the work better, or only cheaper? If the answer is only cheaper, we have never been interested.

We work through every tier.
Most firms stop at the first.

A comprehensive recovery audit has three progressively deeper tiers of error detection. Each tier requires its own tools, its own expertise, and its own discipline. Most competitors execute well on the first tier and bill out. We believe genuine recovery only begins at the second.

Tier 01
Common process errors

Duplicate payments, straightforward overpayments, missed discounts and allowances. Captured through basic reporting techniques — three-way match, standard duplicates reports, queries, and data-mining analytics. This is table stakes. Every firm does this tier.

Where generalist firms stop.
Tier 02
Errors specific to your supply chain, procure-to-pay, and merchandising practices

Pricing errors. Under-deductions. Promotions and allowances. Freight and logistics anomalies. Non-monetized adjustments. Captured only by client-specific audit routines, tailored exception reporting, and algorithm-driven proprietary software that understands your business.

Where our rate earns itself back many times over.
Tier 03
Highly behavioral or situational errors

Cultural practices. ERP and EDI synchronization issues. Software and system failures. Unique transaction patterns that no script would ever recognize. Captured through intensive post-audit review by highly trained experts fluent in your supply chain, systems, and processes.

Where forty years of experience becomes indispensable.

Our structured approach focuses resources across every tier, with the discipline to know where each engagement's largest recoveries actually hide. Our goal is to identify and eliminate exposures across all stages of the continuum — not just the easy ones.

How an engagement unfolds.

Contingency-based. One to two hours per week of your time. We handle the rest.

01 / 05
Days 0 — 20

Data Receipt & Conversion

We work with the data you have — in whatever format you already have it, from whatever system you run on. Our developers build custom ingestion pipelines tailored to your environment. Data dictionary review to confirm understanding of each field. No discovery fees. No setup charges.

  • Any format, any system
  • Custom pipelines built per engagement
  • Zero setup cost to the client

The five-dimensional approach to duplicate recovery.

This is one small window into how we work — the same rigor is applied across more than a hundred distinct claim types. Most firms run a single pass for duplicate payments: same PO, same vendor, same invoice, same amount, same date. They find the obvious ones and move on. We do not stop there.

Our five-dimensional analysis is tailored to each client's data environment and runs every dimension on every engagement. We regularly follow competitor firms as a second pass and find material additional duplicates they missed.

01
Standard Duplicates

Multiple payments for one invoice. Same PO, vendor, invoice, amounts, dates.

02
Vendor-ID Error Duplicates

Payments routed to the wrong vendor. Same amounts and dates, different vendor numbers. Overlooked by single-dimension scans.

03
Advanced Iteration Duplicates

Erroneous invoice iterations tied to shortages, discounts, allowances, returns, freight. Same vendor and timing, different amounts — analyzed in the context of related transactions.

04
Fuzzy Invoice Match

Multiple iterations of an invoice number — prepended or postpended characters. Same vendor, same amounts, slightly different invoice strings.

05
General PO Accounting

PO total cost compared against the sum of all related invoices paid. Identifies overpayments often including duplicates across the entire purchase order.

Costing is where we earn our rate.

For major department stores and complex merchants, the bulk of recoverable value hides in costing and discount compliance. These are the claims that require deep understanding of retail operating rhythms — and the claims most firms avoid because they are harder to detect and harder to substantiate.

We specialize here. What follows is a small, representative selection — not an exhaustive list.

Market-price tracking Pipeline inventory priced against market movement through the delivery cycle. Where cost drift hides.
Terms across related POs Cost and discount terms that should propagate through related orders but do not. Where treatment goes inconsistent.
Promotional cost behavior Cost-retail alignment before, during, and after promotional windows. Where margin quietly erodes event by event.
Drop-ship IMU analysis Initial-markup anomalies on drop-ship units. Manually keyed, rarely re-reviewed without the right tooling.
Written-prior-to-change protections Orders written before a cost change and paid after. The client should receive the original cost.
Late-ship and past-cancel remedies Extension and cancellation mechanics routinely missed without deep procurement knowledge.

Tools we built ourselves.
And only we have.

A representative sampling. Customized for every engagement, built on forty-plus years of recovery audit expertise and best practices.

Core · 01
Mehlman Proprietary
Data Ingestion Engine

Takes any data source, any format, any schema — and understands it. Our ingestion layer reads what you have in whatever shape it arrives, maps it against your environment, and normalizes it for the analysis engine downstream. No discovery fees. No setup charges. Your data, however it arrives.

  • ERP-agnostic: SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, JDE, Workday, Dynamics, Infor, homegrown
  • Cross-system normalization for multi-ERP environments
  • Per-engagement data dictionary reconciliation
Core · 02
Mehlman Proprietary
Data Analysis Engine

The core of our testing. Flags every potential recovery across more than a hundred claim types, which our experts then carefully review. Configurable to client specifications, tailored to exact scope, claim-type set, and assumptions. The most thorough analysis device in the industry. Period.

  • Client-tuned: scope, claim types, thresholds, assumptions
  • Every potential surfaced for expert review — no auto-submission
  • Extended continuously as new claim categories emerge
Supporting tools — a few of many
Infinity Data Engine

Built for long-horizon audits. Handles review windows of seven-plus years of transactional data while maintaining claim precision. For engagements where volume would overwhelm generic tooling.

Five-Dimensional Duplicate Engine

Our multi-pass duplicate-detection framework. Five distinct dimensions, each designed to catch a category of payment error missed by single-dimension industry-standard scripts.

Claim Lifecycle Tooling

Paperless claim management, built in-house. Clients access every claim, supporting documentation, vendor correspondence, and status in real time. Approve, deny, hold, or reverse from a single interface.

Bulk Claims Uploader

Proven with our longest-standing retail client and adaptable to any AP system. Enables near-instant processing of our claim output — weeks of manual entry compressed into a single bulk operation.

Your data, handled with care.

Zero material security incidents in forty-plus years of operation. We work with major ERPs and an equal share of homegrown systems, and our data-handling practices meet the standards expected by Fortune 1000 clients with sensitive financial information.

Client data resides on enterprise-grade infrastructure with strict access controls, encryption at rest and in transit, and end-to-end audit discipline applied to every engagement.

Encryption

Client data is encrypted — at rest on our systems and in transit between parties. Enterprise-grade standards applied to every file, every transfer, every engagement.

Threat Detection

Enterprise-grade protections against malware, phishing, and other threats. Inbound files pass through active threat defenses before they reach our team.

Access Control & Authentication

Access to client data is tightly scoped — limited to the team on your engagement, only for the work at hand. Every access is authenticated and logged.

ERP Compatibility

We have ingested data from SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, JDE, Workday, Microsoft Dynamics, Infor, and dozens of homegrown platforms. Many clients run multiple ERPs across business units — we blend and normalize across systems.

Minimal Client Burden

We make your data work — in whatever format you already have it. One to two hours per week of client involvement is typical. Weekly progress reports keep you informed without consuming your time.

Contingency only.
Never the lowest. Usually the highest return.

Every engagement is contingency-based. If we do not recover, you do not pay. Our incentive aligns perfectly with yours.

Rates are calibrated to each engagement. We are not the lowest-priced firm in the industry, and we do not try to be. Our clients consistently net the highest post-commission dollar recovery because our recoveries — deeper and more thorough than competitors — outpace the rate difference many times over.

Our commitment: deliver the maximum post-commission bottom-line profit recovery in the industry. We have been operating on this principle for forty years — reflected in a 90%+ client retention rate.

Every rate is a conversation. Every relationship is a partnership.

Discuss an engagement