Fraud detection has dominated the conversation around AI in finance for years. While stopping fraud is undeniably important, it represents only a small slice of the daily challenges facing finance teams when managing expenses. Manual reviews, inconsistent policy enforcement, and growing transaction volumes continue to strain finance operations teams.

At AppZen, we believe the future of finance operations is about managing expense risk before payment, not after the fact. It’s about agentic automation and AI-powered systems that proactively understand context, take action before expenses are reimbursed, and continuously improve compliance across the entire expense audit workflow.

Expense growth has changed the audit model

CFOs want to reimburse employees quickly while maintaining control, compliance, and confidence in financial outcomes. But as travel rebounds, hybrid work expands, and global teams grow, employee expense volumes continue to rise. This means more expense reports, more receipts, and more policy exceptions.

CFOs need a smart, proactive approach to expense auditing and technology that prevents issues before reimbursement. 

The limits of focusing only on fraud

Traditional expense audit solutions are designed to identify anomalies and suspicious behavior, then route them to human reviewers. This model assumes that risk management is primarily about fraud detection and investigation. It often only catches problems after money has been reimbursed to the employee.

In reality, most expense issues stem from noncompliance with the organization’s expense policy and errors such as missing receipts. Simple mistakes happen more often when transaction volumes overwhelm manual review processes.

Beyond the financial impact, CFOs are mainly concerned about inconsistent policy enforcement, limited visibility into employee spend, and rising operational costs for their finance teams.

Agentic automation changes expense audit

Agentic automation takes a fundamentally different approach to expense auditing. Instead of simply flagging transactions, AI agents understand context, interpret company policy, and, most importantly, take action. This has a positive effect across the entire expense audit lifecycle, as problems are caught before reimbursement happens.

AppZen Expense Audit’s AI Agents can review 100% of expense line items in near-real-time. They validate receipts, analyze spend behavior, interpret policy intent, and evaluate each expense against historical patterns and merchant data. These Agents review more deeply than just asking, “Is this fraud?” They ask, “Is this appropriate, compliant, and accurate for this business?”

Most importantly, the majority of expense issues are resolved autonomously, meaning a person never has to touch them. Compliant expenses flow through without friction. Clear violations are addressed immediately. Only a small percentage of complex or ambiguous cases are escalated to finance teams for review.

This transforms expense audit from a reactive, manual control into a proactive, always-on system that prevents erroneous and non-compliant expenses from ever being reimbursed.

Agentic expense audits built for CFOs

The value of agentic automation for CFOs includes:

  • Reduced reliance on manual expense reviewers, even as expense volumes grow

  • Consistent, policy-driven enforcement across every employee and submission

  • Earlier issue prevention that stops non-compliant reimbursements before money leaves the business

By embedding AI and AI Agents directly into expense audit workflows, AppZen enables finance leaders to scale oversight, improve compliance, and control spend without slowing the business down.

From sampling to 100% audit coverage

Traditional expense audits rely on sampling because reviewing every transaction simply isn’t feasible for humans. Agentic automation eliminates that tradeoff. AppZen reviews every expense, every time, without creating friction for employees or bottlenecks for finance.

This gives CFOs a much better experience than the choice between speed and control. Now they can have both, without the need for additional headcount. Employees receive faster reimbursements, while finance gains the confidence that spending aligns with policy.

What is the role of human oversight in agentic expense audits?

Agentic automation doesn’t remove people entirely from the expense audit workflow. But it does change their focus. Instead of chasing missing receipts or reviewing low-risk meal expenses, finance teams are able to focus on meaningful exceptions, policy optimization, and strategic oversight of the system. They offer valuable feedback to AI agents so that the agents learn and continually improve, requiring less human intervention over time.

The result is an expense audit function that supports growth, improves employee experience, and strengthens financial governance.

The future of expense audit is agentic

As expense transaction volumes continue to grow, CFOs need platforms that can reason, act, and adapt in real time. Flagging issues after the damage is done is no longer an acceptable practice. AppZen Expense Audit delivers that future today, helping finance leaders move beyond fraud detection to true expense control through agentic automation.

To find out more, check out AppZen Expense Audit today.