5 ways AI can accelerate expense management.

Every dollar and hour counts for companies in today’s uncertain macroeconomic climate. As a finance leader, you’re tasked with ensuring responsible and compliant spending enterprise-wide — even as the vast majority of spend decisions happen outside of your office.

The traditional model of command and control is highly inefficient and almost impossible to apply to global or distributed workforces. Finance teams and managers can’t carefully review every expense manually to ensure that all spend is in policy and on budget. And you can’t dedicate all your time to chasing down receipts and memos, because your team needs to keep their attention on high-impact strategic work.

This old-school approach to controlling spend is taxing for employees too. Keeping up with a sprawling, ever-changing expense policy is difficult. In a typical scenario, employees are able to maintain compliance by manually collecting receipts, filling out memos, and submitting expense reports for every purchase. In reality, this tedious process means that employees are wasting time on the wrong tasks, and many transactions will fall through the cracks and outside of policy limits.

Without the right expense management automation in place, controlling spend and maintaining compliance can be productivity killers for finance teams, managers, and employees.

Recent advances in AI automation and agents are the answer, empowering you to make expense policy compliance easy for both budget owners and spenders. AI-driven expense management can include auto-enforced spend controls, embedded policies across all payment types, automated receipts, and AI-enabled suggestions and automations.

Artificial intelligence technology is still advancing, but AI-enabled expense management is taking hold at forward-thinking companies and enabling unprecedented efficiency, accuracy, and compliance.

A tried and true application of AI is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR technology uses automated data extraction and storage capabilities and can be applied to many expense management workflows to save time, cost, and other resources. For example, OCR can generate expense reports off of a single receipt in any language or currency — no matter how faded or crumpled. It can also read an entire invoice and prepare a payment for signoff in minutes, saving important details and applying them in the future.

Going a step deeper into automation, AI and machine learning can auto-generate receipts and memos and populate expense report fields intelligently in some cases. It’s hard to imagine, but AI makes it possible to actually collect every memo, IRS-compliant receipt, and other details needed to close the books without any manual effort by employees — or any nagging by you.

AI is a friend to managers too, enabling them to skip expense reviews that comply with company policy and instead only flagging exceptions for them. This saves managers hours and anxiety — and saves the company risk — because they no longer have to review every transaction, never having enough time to actually spot and review the outliers. AI can automate in-policy expense approvals and guide managers to the expenses that deserve careful human attention.

To further ensure cost efficiency and control, AI can also run securely in the background and detect duplicate transactions and fraud patterns, learning as it goes. When suspicious charges arise, AI-enabled agents can alert finance and accounting leaders to take immediate action, even making recommendations for the best resolution based on past data. This bolsters your team’s internal controls and decision making and minimizes the company’s financial risk.

Using AI can essentially give your managers and finance an infinite number of extra assistants at their command, willing to take on the tedious tasks that slow them down and able to digest volumes of data and detect anomalies lightning fast. This can increase your finance team’s productivity and efficiency tenfold.

Employees want to spend frictionlessly and stay in compliance with your expense policy — but with the least amount of effort. Unfortunately, there are many steps to spending and expense reporting that make the process laborious and leave room for error. At the end of the day, employees just want to do what is required in the shortest amount of time.

Imagine then if you could give every employee an AI-powered expense assistant. Well, you’d be able to ensure that all of their spend stays compliant and close the books faster, while making the process painless for all parties involved.

With an AI-enabled personal assistant, you could deliver an exceptional end-user experience. With a tireless assistant handling the manual tasks that come with corporate travel and expenses, employees could save hours per month. In turn, they’d regain capacity to focus on the bigger picture — higher-level tasks and strategic decisions to boost the company’s bottom line.

From the finance team to employees distributed globally, AI-enabled automation and expense assistants can drive efficiency, compliance, and productivity:

1. Auto-filled receipts and memos
Your employees don’t want to be saddled with documentation requirements (read: homework) after every business expense. An AI-enabled expense assistant can automatically populate receipts, fill out memos, and suggest likely attendees with every IRS-required detail automatically accounted for.

2. Better categorization and decision making
By leveraging context like calendar info, transaction details, and historical data, an AI assistant could provide intelligent suggestions to augment employee decision making and assign each expense to its appropriate budget.

3. Smarter suggestions for a premium travel experience
An AI expense assistant could improve business travel compliance by answering which hotels, flights, and car rentals are within policy. With next-gen AI, the AI assistant could also make recommendations to fit the traveler’s itinerary, preferences, and budget, just like a human assistant would.

4. Automated expense reviews and flagged exceptions
Managers and department leads can’t spend their day reviewing routine and recurring purchases that clearly fall within your company’s expense policy. With an AI assistant to flag irregularities, managers can review by exception and take a deeper dive into anything that might fall outside of policy.

5. Instant insights to accelerate decision making
Let’s say your finance team wants to track the marketing departments yearly spend against last year’s total. Instead of crunching all of the data manually, you could simply pose the question to your AI assistant and receive a comprehensive report in no time.