Streamline processes

The issue with the standard expense reimbursement process

When it comes to reimbursable expenses, your process may be straightforward, but it can still feel taxing to your employees. Every month or so, they diligently enter all of their business purchases into your expense management platform, hit “submit,” and then wait to be reimbursed. For most employees, a longer wait can cause them financial stress, especially if personal budgets are tight. There are a lot of steps in the expense reimbursement process – obtaining manager approval, reviewing receipts, making sure business meal attendees are all accounted for, and checking the boxes on your expense policy. For most large companies, end-to-end expense reimbursement can take a couple of weeks.

Besides being a burden on employees, your expense reimbursement process can also be hard on managers. Managers don’t always have the time, knowledge, or context to review expenses with the diligence that is required to find and rectify spend compliance problems. They either give reports a cursory look with a “rubber stamp” approval or sit on them until they have time to review them diligently. Both approaches are problematic, resulting in either spend leakage or long reimbursement times that frustrate employees and contribute to their poor financial health.

Streamline your invoice approval process

Despite the invoice automation and spend approval best practices you’ve put in place, it’s hard to audit all invoices prior to payment and still maintain an efficient operation. Matching prices and units across invoices, POs, and receipts is important, but ensuring invoices are error-free, compliant, and not fraudulent is nearly impossible at an enterprise scale when you have to approve tens of thousands of invoices every month.

It's a very real dilemma. Letting spend pass by without a real look can spell trouble. According to the ACFE, every year there are thousands of invoice and billing fraud examples across dozens of industries in hundreds of countries, the median cost of which is more than $100,000. Beyond fraud and other spend controls, invoice compliance is a big issue. According to the IOFM, invoices fail the first “match” in your validation process between 10 and 30 percent of the time, depending on your level of AP automation and centralization.

To streamline your invoice automation process, what’s required is an automated spend approvals process that is thorough, accurate, and efficient. You need to catch errors, waste, and fraud, and ensure compliance with company policy and relevant regulations. And you need to do it at an enterprise scale.

AI-powered invoice auditing from AppZen is your finance team’s salvation. Our platform gives you the keen eye you need to find the spend leakage and compliance violations in your business spend, coupled with the automation muscle you need to get through all of those invoices efficiently.