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. 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
AI analytics can help you optimize your spending by identifying areas where you can save money. AI agents prebuilt for your most critical use cases can also reduce your OpEx dramatically. For example, AI analytics might recognize a pattern of out-of-policy weekend expenses for a specific department over a given period. You could then deploy a specific AI agent or model to more closely monitor and auto-reject those exact expenses. Applying AI to targeted, high-risk actions based on identified trends can help trim unnecessary spend and deliver significant savings over time.
4. Support employee cost-consciousness
Encourage employees to be mindful of costs and take an active role in achieving company savings goals. And support them in doing so. Educate employees on the importance of cost management and provide them with the resources and tools to help them make informed decisions. Incentivize employees’ cost-saving behavior by rewarding them for their contributions to savings initiatives. Show them you care about their financial well-being with AI tools that speed up compliant reimbursements, so they aren’t performing a balancing act on an expense report highwire.
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 non-compliance and catch AI-generated receipts, 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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For more on how CFOs can optimize finance teams with agentic AI automation, read: The intelligent finance office: A CFO’s blueprint for AI-driven success
