The word “audit” conjures up many negative connotations. Whether it’s the government looking into your taxes or the corporate accountants going over a company’s books, the audit process can be a nerve wracking experience. Another area where auditing can cause a considerable amount of angst is employee expense approvals. For a long time, finance teams have had to navigate a highly manual and subjective process. What percentage of expenses need to be audited? How do they determine whose expenses get audited? Do they use an expensive external audit team, or a costly internal process that carries the risk of coercion or collusion? Because of these often conflicting concerns, expense auditing can often be far from perfect.
We’ve spoken with countless Emburse customers about what they want from the audit experience, and their responses were clear:
- They want a smarter solution that cuts the amount of time their team needs to spend reviewing each expense report.
- They want the ability to audit every expense report in a timely manner, to avoid missing potential infractions.
- They want the impartial eye of an auditor, without the exorbitant price tag.
Given what may seem like conflicting expectations, creating a new audit solution wasn’t an easy task. But thanks to incredibly talented data science and product development teams, we did it. Emburse Audit is an incredibly powerful solution that combines AI and machine learning with a team of expert auditors to make the audit workflow a faster, more accurate and more cost effective process than was previously possible. It also enables teams to audit 100% of expenses, resulting in a far more secure process.
Underpinning it all is our sophisticated AI-based audit engine, which analyzes every expense report as it comes in. Doing this in near-real-time after an expense report is submitted means that organizations don’t need to select which expenses get audited, and which can potentially pass through the net. Expenses suspected of being non-compliant are then routed to an independent human auditor, who will review it, and can then either send it back for correction and resubmission, or can forward it through the internal approval chain.
This approach gives Emburse customers the best of all worlds: the ability for all expenses to be audited before being routed for approval, using a dedicated, impartial, external approver - without the exorbitant price tag traditionally associated with this process. It eliminates the potential for internal staff to be pressured into approving potentially out of policy or fraudulent spend. And even better, using machine learning, the solution gets smarter every time it’s used.
We wanted to take the headache of expense auditing away from internal teams, without breaking the bank. Looking at Emburse Audit, we’ve achieved this goal. If you’d like to get more information on how it could benefit your organization, please schedule a demo today.