Expense Audit receipt verification lets you know what is on every receipt

Our ongoing “Did you know?” series highlights the capabilities and benefits of AppZen Expense Audit, bringing you deeper into what makes it tick and how you can take advantage. In this segment, we explore how AppZen’s Expense Audit handles receipt verification through its automated, Mastermind AI-driven capability to improve accuracy, decrease finance workload, and capture your organization's true ROI.  

Employee theft costs US businesses an estimated $50 billion a year, so it is no wonder that companies are concerned about fraud.

There are several common types of fraud, one of which occurs via the corporate credit card. Many organizations issue employees physical credit cards with unlimited spending power to pay for travel, meals, entertainment, and other business-related expenses. 

As the business grows and hires more and more employees, the receipts for these expenses can quickly pile up and finance teams can become overwhelmed trying to reconcile it all. This means that fraudulent purchases can fall through the cracks, allowing illegitimate expenditures to go unnoticed. While many fraudulent purchases are small in scale (such as personal meals or transportation), some people adopt a “go big or go home” mentality when defrauding their employers.

As an expense auditor, verifying and correlating receipts can be a time-consuming and tedious task. It requires you to wade through endless receipt types, including incomplete and hand-written transactions, or slog through the time-consuming task of tracking down employees to verify correct purchase amounts. With non-automated systems, if your OCR scanning is unreliable, you may need to visually inspect every receipt. And you may need to retrain your auditors on every new company policy change. All this makes your receipt verification process difficult to scale, provides inaccurate data, and leaves you in the dark about the true state of your organization's overall spend.

AppZen’s Expense Audit solution makes receipt verification a breeze. By automatically reading and contextually understanding every receipt in real time, Expense Audit automates the approval of thousands of low-risk transactions and identifies high-risk items in minutes. This allows organizations to reduce finance workload and focus their auditor’s time on transactions that truly impact the bottom line. Best of all, Expense Audit accomplishes this before payment, so you can catch errors, eliminate unnecessary spend, and ensure compliance before paying out a single cent. 

Expense Audit Mastermind AI technology offers world-class receipt verification capabilities designed to save you time and improve overall data accuracy. With Expense Audit, you can automatically verify a single receipt total against the amount entered by the employee, and look at individual line items to ensure that they are in line with corporate policies. This can reduce the manual effort involved in certifying each receipt line by 90%. 

Expense Audit can also extract individual receipts from a scanned image that contains multiple receipts, and can automatically match and verify against what employees enter into the system. This eliminates the time-consuming, manual effort of separating multiple receipts within a single image. You know right away if there is a problem with the receipt and can easily prevent payment if the totals do not match. 

It also makes it easy for corporations to track suspicious spend. It can quickly verify if itemized rather than credit card receipts have been included for expense types that require those details, like hotels and meals. In addition, it can track weekend expenses. This allows you to stop fraud in its tracks, and identify problematic, repeat offenders who disregard company policy by not providing both credit card and itemized receipts when a corporate card is used. 

You can easily enforce company policies, identify out-of-policy spend, track employees who repeatedly submit late receipts, and take appropriate action. You can determine whether the receipt submitted is beyond the required company policy submission date, set cash and credit threshold limits per attendee for each expense type, and even assign a risk score. 

With Expense Audit, no receipt is left behind. Its Mastermind AI technology goes beyond table stakes and can validate various types of receipt images provided by employees, ensuring that they meet your quality requirements. For example, it can identify whether a receipt is a handwritten sticky note, an excessively blurry image, or a random photo that is not a receipt at all. Your data remains accurate as junk information is removed.   

Expense Audit’s world-class, Mastermind AI-driven receipt verification capabilities reduce manual effort by up to 90%, catch out of policy spend in real-time, expose fraud, and identify employees who are repeat offenders so you can take immediate action, allowing you to capture the true ROI of your finance organization.

Learn how AppZen’s Expense Audit can streamline your receipt verification process. 

In the weeks to come, we will be discussing the details of how to manage expense audits, including travel compliance, detecting out-of-policy spend, suspicious merchants, and duplicates, among other topics. Until then, stay tuned and get in touch!