5 ways to hit company savings goals with AI

As a finance manager, one of your primary responsibilities is to help your company reach its savings goals. Achieving these goals requires a strategic approach, as well as a willingness to implement new ideas and tactics. Exploring new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) tools, as well as updating internal processes and adjusting T&E policies, are top of mind for CFOs. These initiatives serve to streamline your operations, improve decision-making, and enhance the employee experience in your finance department, creating an overall reduction in money and time spent for your organization. Here are five ways you can help your company hit its savings targets with finance AI.

1. Modify your T&E policy to reduce spend and enforce it!

When was the last time you updated your T&E policy? If it’s been more than two years, you’re missing out on some valuable cost-saving initiatives (consider how work-from-home initiatives and travel have changed since the pandemic). By automating the expense review process with AI, you can save time, reduce errors, and ensure that every expense is properly vetted before it gets approved, while still achieving a 100% audit on each submitted report.

2. Use technology to automate financial processes

One of the biggest challenges in managing expenses is the time and focus necessary to properly review, approve, and audit expense reports while avoiding spend leakage. This process is both time-consuming and requires significant attention to detail. AI technology can automate these processes to save you time while reducing the risk of errors and fraud. Implementing software solutions that incorporate finance AI into expense auditing and accounts payable automation can streamline financial processes, enabling the finance team to focus on strategic initiatives.

3. Optimize your spending

Automation through artificial intelligence can also help you optimize your spending by identifying areas where you can save money. Our Client Success team monitors activity and provides quarterly business reviews to help you pinpoint anomalous spend patterns. They'll suggest updated AI models and policies based on industry best practices. For example, we might suggest switching to a more cost-effective vendor or monitoring weekend expenses, based on the patterns AI finds over a given spend period. Applying high-risk rules based on spend trends by department or user can also help trim unnecessary spend. By making these small changes, you can achieve significant savings over time.

4. Encourage employee cost-consciousness

It's important to encourage all employees to be mindful of costs and help them take an active role in achieving company savings goals. Educate employees on the importance of cost management and provide them with the resources and tools to help them make informed decisions. Incentivize cost-saving behavior by rewarding employees for their contributions to savings initiatives. AI tools that streamline expense reimbursements to pay employees back quickly also reward compliant spend behavior and show employees that you care about their own financial well-being.

5. Gain real-time insights into your finances

Real-time insights into company finances through analytics tools allow you to make more informed decisions about where to allocate resources. Full visibility into all spend coming through your expenses, credit cards, and invoices, in a centralized platform, provides your finance team the visibility into patterns of spend that may go unnoticed. AI technology gives you deeper and more actionable insights into approver workflows and autonomous approval trends. Identifying these trends in your spending and workflows can help you make adjustments as needed to ensure that you stay on track to hit your savings goals.

AppZen offers a powerful artificial intelligence platform that can help keep your company well-equipped to face economic uncertainty. Using AI to automate your expense review process, identify duplicate expenses, monitor for fraud and non-compliance, optimize your spending, and gain real-time insights into your finances, you can save time, reduce costs, and ultimately achieve your financial objectives.

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Watch the video to accompany this blog post: 5 ways to hit company savings goals: Lower spend, save time, and remove inefficiencies
For more on how to save with AI, read: 8 ways to eliminate unnecessary spend, waste, and fraud with AI