New Executive Dashboard puts AppZen’s benefits at your fingertips

Finance teams focus a lot of time and energy on day-to-day finance management, but they’re also expected to work towards long-term department goals and business planning. Our customers view our platform as an integral part in helping them effectively reduce waste, proactively enforce their company T&E policy, and efficiently scale the audit process. 

Reducing spend, complying with policy, and streamlining processes are crucial strategy components for any finance team, but they’re often difficult to quantify. Now, finance teams can finally quantify the value of AI-based spend auditing with the new Executive Dashboard. This dashboard provides insightful analytics around the money and time saved, giving you a clearer understanding of how we help you reduce spend, comply with policy, and streamline process. 

Introducing the Executive Dashboard

The Executive Dashboard provides a high-level overview of the total amount of T&E spend rejected by auditors (reduce spend), highlights the total amount of T&E spend flagged as out-of-policy (comply with policy), and estimates the potential amount of hours it would take an auditor to manual review the lower risk reports (and medium risk) if they weren’t using our platform to audit and auto-approve (streamline process). This information can be segmented in different ways providing a more tailored view by organization, different currencies, or specific timeframes to drill down into your data and share with the executive team. 

See your spend reduction 

This metric is calculated by the total amount of rejected expenses over a period of time. For example, a common error we see is re-submitted expenses. An employee might submit a receipt, and then the following month, resubmit it for a second time. Our AI will flag this as a duplicate instead of paying it out, which is reflected in the estimated number of savings you’ll see in your dashboard, which can be passed along to key stakeholders and the executive team.

You can also view a more detailed breakdown of your estimated spend reduction by month. Click on the bar chart to see the expense reports that contributed to the total amount of spend reduced within a particular timeframe.

Track out-of-policy spend 

This metric allows you to view the total number of expense reports that were submitted with out-of-policy expenses as well as the total amount of spending in unauthorized expense categories. These metrics provide insights for you to see which out-of-policy expenses account for the most money and quickly identify problem areas the company can take action to address poor spending behavior. So for example, if you notice a lot of out-of-policy spend being approved for airfare, you might want to re-educate your employees on the airline ticket policy, or adjust it. 

To view a monthly breakdown of out-of-policy spend by a specific category simply click on the bar chart. A bar chart will appear below the “Top 10 Out-Of-Policy Spend By Category” bar chart providing a month to month view of the category selected. 

Streamline process 

With artificial intelligence, your low and medium risk reports are approved automatically, allowing your auditors to focus only on the high-risk reports and ultimately save time that would have been spent combing through each line item. On this section of the dashboard, you can see the total amount of spend that was auto-approved, as well as the estimated number of hours saved. This will give your team a better understanding of audit process savings, as well as help you track process improvements you’ve made by implementing AI-based spend auditing. 

You can also view a further breakdown of the auto-approved reports by month by clicking on the bar chart. You’ll see a breakdown of auto-approved reports and the auto-approved total amount of the selected month. 

Managing expense reports is no easy feat. You need to catch duplicates, out-of-policy expenses and of course, fraud – before you pay, and without disrupting your company’s day-to-day processes. We strive to help customers reduce spend, comply with policy, and streamline their audit process. With the introduction of the Executive Dashboard, now you can see the value of AI-based spend auditing front and center.