AppZen Launches Innovative AppStore

AppZen AppStore - Customized AI Apps For All Your Expense Needs 

AppZen has launched the first-ever Finance AI AppStore with apps that help customers solve complex T&E issues without the hassle of time-consuming or costly development. At launch, the Appzen AppStore includes 13 Mastermind AI apps that customers can add to their Expense Audit solution right away to tailor T&E workflows and enforce compliance requirements unique to their organization.  

Why is this such a big deal?

Every finance process applies policies and rules, workflows, and data to drive decisions that reduce spend and risk while propelling the business forward. Historically, these policies were prescribed in rules, procedures, and workflows. Decisions that were either more nuanced than if-this-then-that, or relied on extracting data from paper documents in combination with research and judgment, were left to human decision-makers. Correctly coding an invoice or assessing the risk of an expense report involves nuances and complications. For example, separating an invoice from other pages attached to an email, identifying a non-PO invoice from a new supplier as a software subscription and knowing to accrue the spend over time, or looking beyond the merchant category code to confirm that a restaurant expense isn’t really a gentleman’s club in disguise all require subjectivity. Each of these tasks is relatively easy for a human, once you train them, but very difficult to define and encode as a set of discrete rules or procedures.

Artificial intelligence capabilities redefine what is possible. They don’t rely on discrete rules or procedures like prior generations of automation (RPA, for example). Instead, they rely on large data sets, identifying patterns and predicting the right decision from the decisions made in the past. Additionally, every decision is made with a precisely measured level of confidence, which makes it possible to automate processes end-to-end, and only ask for a human to confirm, clarify, or make a decision when historical patterns are not enough to guide the system. This is exactly the way human learning works. We are taught to follow a standard operating procedure, learn the common patterns, ask for guidance in edge cases that don’t fit the standard process, and identify and learn even more patterns over time, requiring less and less guidance.

It’s no surprise that artificial intelligence has taken off in finance processes. What hasn’t existed before is a way to take advantage of the most sophisticated finance AI to extend common capabilities and deliver tailored value for every customer. That’s the goal of the AppZen AppStore.

For example, many of our customers do business in China, where some categories of business expenses include a reimbursable tax called fapiao. Claiming a reimbursement requires a specific, government-issued fapiao receipt. If you’re an American or British finance team, how do you validate that the right fapiao receipt (which is in Mandarin, of course) is attached to the appropriate expenses? How do you validate that it’s a legitimate receipt? With a Mastermind AI-powered app from the AppZen AppStore, customers can very easily start to automate this process without needing a team of Chinese language experts or tax auditors.

Validating that life sciences employees entertaining health care providers are attaching sign-in sheets documenting attendees, in compliance with the Sunshine Act, provides another example. This requires training the AI to recognize the format of a particular company’s sign-in sheet, when it should be attached. With the appropriate AppStore app, this is quick and painless.

Just as iOS and Android apps have made the phones in our pockets dramatically more useful and powerful, so too will the AppZen AppStore help Expense Managers. These Mastermind AI-driven apps can quickly, easily, and painlessly deliver custom functionality to the over 1,000 finance teams that use AppZen today.

If you’re an AppZen customer, please head over to the AppStore at  https://info.appzen.com/solutions/appstore and let us know which apps might be helpful to you.

We can’t wait to hear from you!