Importance of AI-Powered Expense Management

By CIOReview | Thursday, May 20, 2021

AI-powered expense manage-ment automation free finance leaders from manual, labor-intensive processes and help focus their time on the strategic concerns that matter most.

FREMONT, CA: Finance chiefs and their teams are looking to technology to revamp finance management, freeing up time from tasks to focus significant attention on analytical matters. Yet, given the massive array of existing and evolving technologies, it’s often complex to know where to start. For several organizations, travel and expense management is a primary candidate for automation, with existing operations still manual, time-consuming, and erroneous. Today, customizable AI-based technology exists to automate expense management and do so smartly, allowing organizations to set their rules and decision-making based on their specific needs.

There are several ways that flexible AI-based expense management and audit technology can enforce a firm’s specific policies. There may be several thresholds and expense policies that apply to projects within an organization. AI-powered systems allow the automatic creation of custom rules to monitor spend within general ledger codes representing specific client projects and company events. With more employees working from home, applying work-from-home policies automatically has become a significant area of focus for several organizations. AI-based expense audit technology can use dynamic conditions to apply various work-from-home policies if a person working from home submits a travel expense claim.

Many organizations need pre-approval for specific expenses, like entertaining clients at a sporting event. Employees require submitting a signed business document along with their expenses. Although the format of the documents differs between firms, AI can read, understand, and audit pre-approval documents to make sure they have been signed off and the policy is followed. Some employees are given specific money that they are let to submit for reimbursement over time, like a lifetime or allowance for productivity tools. With customizable AI-powered systems, it is seamless to create custom rules to do expense management for each employee to ensure they don’t exceed their allowance over time.