Problem

Zero visibility, complex hierarchies, and manual reviews overwhelmed managers

With over a million employees distributed globally, team reporting hierarchies at this billion-dollar business were undoubtedly complex. Managing T&E expenses presented significant challenges for managers and finance leaders, who lacked the time and resources to review each team member’s receipts and ensure compliance with company policies. Their existing expense approval system lacked important context to help them make informed decisions, leading managers to blindly approve 80% of all receipts without proper scrutiny. 

It was impossible to gain visibility into team spend across disparate locations and understand the impact of wasteful, non-compliant employee spend among their massive workforce. As they began to research solutions, they focused on a tool that would:

  • Remove managers from the time-consuming need to check individual direct reports’ expenses across multiple geographies and currencies
  • Enforce company-wide controls and ensure SOX compliance
  • Allow finance leaders to quickly review team spend, track trends and exceptions, and benchmark team expenses against departmental budgets
  • Quickly identify employees’ high-risk spend in order to take immediate action

AI could transform how managers review by highlighting specific red flags, explaining their significance, and providing clear action steps. That targeted guidance would be a game-changer.

 

Senior Leader, Global Expense Management

Solution

Real-time, customizable visibility into team and individual spend

Through AppZen’s Expense Audit technology, the company transformed its T&E operations, customizing policies to match changing business needs, uncovering significant cost savings, and streamlining approvals. The effect was significant, as managers’ pain points were removed. Yet even with these successes, this enterprise was eager to push the boundaries to achieve even greater productivity at scale. With over 250,000 expense reports submitted every month, their challenge required an innovative solution.

AI-powered Team Insights was implemented globally, giving managers on-demand visibility into spend across any currency, business unit, and region–all from a single dashboard. With 10 different charts and graphs, managers could finally examine end-user behavior through customizable data, including date range, manager, cost center, report status, organizations, policies, payment type, and direct reports.

This single source of truth provided a targeted analysis of trends, like top spenders within a team and total high-risk spending based on company policies. Decision-makers could also configure emails with personalized reports, highlighting problematic spending and proactively catching anomalies. With real-time notifications, managers could take immediate action and quickly course-correct potentially problematic behavior.

Result

Strengthened compliance, data-backed approvals, and 4x faster payments

AppZen’s solutions helped this e-commerce leader transform its approval workflow by automating decisions for low- and medium-risk expenses. In six months, they effectively eliminated blind and negligent “rubber stamp” approvals across their 3 million annual expense reports while maintaining strict compliance standards. Through automatic receipt validation and intelligent risk assessment, the organization achieved Finance SOX compliance and reduced the burden of routine approvals on management.

AI can help transform managers’ reviews by highlighting specific red flags, explaining their significance, and providing clear, actionable steps.

 

Senior Leader, Global Travel and Expense

Team Insights streamlined expense management by automatically delivering critical analytics to managers’ inboxes. By highlighting only those items requiring attention, the system freed managers from routine approvals to focus instead on leadership and risk management activities.

Removing unnecessary manual reviews and setting up automated workflows reduced reimbursement time by 75%, from an average of 7 days to just 1.81 days–twice as fast as the industry average. This acceleration not only met the CFO’s initiative for faster payments but also significantly improved employee satisfaction with the expense management process. Thanks to Team Insights, the organization now has one source of truth reflecting overall spending across all of its global teams, accessible via a single, on-demand dashboard.