Managing expenses isn’t a task that many people particularly love to work on, yet it’s a vital one and can have enormous ramifications for a business if not handled properly.
If you’d like to find a way to spend less time sorting out this area of your organizational finances and reduce problems simultaneously, it’s worth turning to technology. Thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), expense management is becoming easier and more effective than ever.
Eliminates Physical Receipts that Take Up Space
In many organizations, a lack of space or too much paperwork to store leads to a lot of stress and time spent attempting to locate files. If this is a pain point in your venture, AI can help at least limit expense-based paperwork, among other things. Use digital, automated programs to store data for you and your team and process expense information, so you don’t have to keep holding on to every little receipt or invoice.
A quality expense management solution can save your team from having to print, submit, and then store travel and other expense-related documents for years and dramatically reduce the amount of paperwork that piles up in your offices.
Increases Accuracy
Most of us have to deal with a lot of manual data entry in our businesses, which can be tedious and repetitive. It’s also an area where many errors occur. Happily, though, thanks to artificial intelligence, we can use tech tools now that are quick at spotting inaccurate data points or miscalculated costs.
These mistakes add up over time. They can cause us a lot of lost hours to rectify and money lost, so anything we can do to avoid this is worthwhile, especially when it means saving ourselves the boredom of so much data entry.
Helps Pick Up on Employee Expense Fraud
Many corporations outlay money they don’t need to on faulty employee expense reimbursements each year. This may be because workers knowingly submit inflated expense claims or because they genuinely make errors. AI and machine learning can help you cut down on expense fraud in your organization and save you money annually.
Computer programs can detect red flags and eliminate errors while scanning and auditing reimbursements. For example, machines can compare expenses noted by staff members with external data sources to check accuracy and spot anomalies. Finance managers, accountants, or others can then look at any items flagged for review in expense reports and verify whether the information is correct or if the computer picked up on a fraudulent claim.
Improves Visibility
Artificial intelligence is helpful when it comes to visibility, too. With AI-powered software, you don’t have to manually tag keywords and descriptions to photos, reports, invoices, and other documents to digitize information like expenses, dates, timestamps, currencies, and more.
Instead, employees take photographs of their receipts while traveling or otherwise away from the office or scan them upon their return. From there, computer vision tools can use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to detect and key data from the uploads. This leads to a significant reduction in manual recordkeeping and time and money savings in turn.
Boosts Compliance
Software powered by artificial intelligence can be used to help your company boost compliance, too. It can analyze expense reports regularly to catch reporting errors and minimize the chances of facing government fines. Programs can examine external resources such as search engine results and social media sites to verify compliance laws laid out in government regulations and check data against company policies. Auditing is much easier with automation tools in place, no matter the industry your business is in.
Provides Helpful Business Insights
Another top reason to utilize AI for expense management in your business is that, via the vast amount of data it can analyze, it can locate patterns and preferences that otherwise might get missed or not actioned. The tech can provide helpful business insights so you and your team can make better decisions regarding travel spending and other expenses.
It’s handy using AI to generate extensive expense reports for your finance officer(s), too. These can be used to break down spending by various categories for each employee, such as project, department, type of expense, location, cost, etc.
Other ways artificial intelligence can help with expense management are by simplifying workflows, enabling faster expense approvals and submissions, and making personalized travel experiences more feasible.
If you haven’t started using AI in your venture yet, it’s time to test out some tools and enjoy the myriad benefits that machine learning can provide.
Founder Dinis Guarda
IntelligentHQ Your New Business Network.
IntelligentHQ is a Business network and an expert source for finance, capital markets and intelligence for thousands of global business professionals, startups, and companies.
We exist at the point of intersection between technology, social media, finance and innovation.
IntelligentHQ leverages innovation and scale of social digital technology, analytics, news, and distribution to create an unparalleled, full digital medium and social business networks spectrum.
IntelligentHQ is working hard, to become a trusted, and indispensable source of business news and analytics, within financial services and its associated supply chains and ecosystems
