An essential component of spend management is the ability to effectively analyze expense and invoice data in a timely manner, and this was never more important than during the rapid economic contraction in the spring and summer of 2020. Effective analysis enables finance leaders to quickly identify potential areas of inefficient, wasteful or even fraudulent spend, and then take measures to quickly contain or correct the issue.
The challenge with analyzing employee expense spend is that, for mid- and large-sized companies, the number of individual line items submitted over the course of a year can run into the millions, across countless vendors, categories, countries, currencies. Detecting patterns or anomalies among these countless items on a spreadsheet is an impossible task. Even using standard reporting software can be incredibly time-consuming and require considerable expertise to turn data into meaningful insights, often leading to outdated recommendations.
We’ve solved this challenge, with the launch of Emburse Analytics, delivering sophisticated next generation analytics capabilities for Emburse customers. It’s built using embedded solutions from two of the most highly-regarded data and analytics technology providers, Looker and Snowflake, and is available for free to all Emburse Certify Expense customers (and soon for Emburse Chrome River Expense customers).
Emburse Analytics empower organizations to budget better, increase accountability and improve compliance. Here are some examples of ways it can help your organization:
- Secure and optimize volume discounts by tracking spend with key vendors, and ensuring spend levels are kept high enough to maintain discounts
- Identify and correct pockets of non-compliant, out-of-policy spend
- Monitor spend by team/department to make more more accurate and effective travel budgets
- Detect patterns in expenses which could show fraudulent spend
Making Emburse Analytics even more powerful are Emburse Analytics Pro and Emburse Insight Advisor. Emburse Analytics Pro enables organizations to optimize their spend and reduce overhead costs by automating management reporting and many other data-related processes. Users can easily schedule and send reports, and manage access for leadership to monitor their teams’ own spending patterns and volumes.
Emburse Insight Advisor is perfect for organizations looking for even deeper analytical capabilities and additional support. Customers can choose the level of service for on-demand expert assistance and periodic check-ins to help turn an organization’s travel and expense data into actionable insights.
We will continue to grow the value that we are providing to our customers with deep insights into organization’s travel bookings and employee and AP spend. You may have seen that we recently acquired travel data leader DVI. As we continue to bring DVI’s capabilities into Emburse Analytics, our customers will be able to get even more powerful, granular, and impactful travel analytics, giving them even better decision support insights.
There’s no doubt that as business travel really begins to return in the coming months, optimizing spend will be even more important. With Emburse Analytics, we’re putting that power in your hands.