Marne Martin
If you look around, the pace of innovation in nearly every industry is not slowing down. In fact, it’s accelerating. For the T&E space and Emburse in particular, it’s never been a more exciting time to witness where innovation is heading to help companies uncover the best business value from their travel and expense budgets.
At Emburse, we are proud to be at the leading edge of not only what’s happening now but what’s next in T&E to help companies stay ahead of the curve. That’s why we recently partnered with YouGov in June 2024 to hear from 500 U.S. travel, finance, HR, and operations professionals and learn the latest trends in business travel and employee spend. The findings, which we unveiled in our new report, Future of Travel and Expense, show a close link between an organisation’s ability to control employee spend and generating positive financial outcomes.
Our latest research proves that organisations that think strategically and adopt best-in-class T&E solutions are also growing their bottom line, whether they’re aware of it or not. The benefit of this to an organisation cannot be overstated, especially with the increasing costs of business travel, more employee autonomy, demand for choice, and other factors. Moreover, high-performing businesses are up to two times more likely to plan to invest in T&E technologies (87% vs. 56%). They are also more likely to be working with a T&E software vendor who they feel is "ahead of the curve” to help them manage emerging demands and challenges (54% vs. 13%).
Insightfully, of those who expect their organisation to improve their T&E tech stack in the next three to five years, the top four areas in which they’re looking to invest include:
- Artificial intelligence (33%)
- Integrating T&E processes and systems such as updating expense platforms (29%)
- Analytics, reporting, and forecasting capabilities (29%)
- Price optimisation technologies (28%)
Emburse’s mission is to help make the lives of professionals easier and deliver the greatest value to our customers. I’d like to share how we are delivering on that promise in four key areas: AI/machine learning, automation, analytics and forecasting, and price optimisation.
AI/machine learning
We’re continuously building and deploying the latest AI and machine learning technology to create efficiency and improve how customers manage spend, leading to better spend control and reduced costs. Some examples of this include document capture with invoice and receipt transcription to ensure accurate reporting and compliance, and audits assisted by machine learning to identify policy violations and potential risks that save auditors a lot of time when reviewing expenses.
Moreover, AI-powered predictions provide the ability to pre-fill expense report fields, give suggestions, and automate downstream processes to ensure clean and complete data is captured. In addition, advanced policy checks and fraud detection help minimise risks and control overall costs for organisations. Compliance, check, reduction in business spend, check, and all powered by AI.
Automation
We leverage the powerful benefits of automation by eliminating manual, time-consuming tasks like data entry, receipt collection, and approvals, significantly reducing administrative costs.
Emburse solutions automate the creation of expense reports by pulling in data from various sources - receipts, travel, card, ERP, and calendars, to take away most of the work in creating and approving expense reports.
Automated systems process expenses quickly and accurately, allowing employees to get reimbursed faster by automatically organising transactions into reports for approval and reporting. Automation boosts employee satisfaction and improves cash flow management by increasing spend visibility, streamlining the entire expense reporting process, freeing up employees' time and ultimately, valuable company resources, to focus on more strategic tasks. This can lead to improved overall productivity and operational efficiency.
Analytics and forecasting
We provide deep insights that improve both policy compliance and cost savings across an organisation. Companies can optimise spend by automatically negotiating better discounts with vendors and identifying high spend categories to improve operational efficiency. Analytics and forecasting also delivers actionable dashboards and personalised reports for travel managers to improve visibility across teams for quicker response time.
Price optimisation technology
Our travel reshopping solution continuously scans for better flight rates with automatic rebookings when cost savings are found. Emburse identified average cost savings of A$91 per flight booking leveraging our technology. Business travellers can also receive alternative hotel recommendations between the time they book and when they travel, saving up to 20% with benchmark identification of cost savings opportunities related to travel policy and supplier contracts. Policy compliance ensures travellers follow travel policy on both TMC and direct supplier bookings with an audit process for every booking against contracted discounts, to ensure they are applied and calculated correctly.
Today’s most game-changing companies are using the latest technologies to harness real business value for their customers. At Emburse, innovation is weaved into everything we do, with customer insight and customer needs at its core. I look forward to sharing more about what we are building for the future of T&E!