Problem

Manual sampling limited team visibility into spend and fraud

Before AppZen, Intuit's audit team manually reviewed a mere 1% of expense reports submitted. This massive gap in visibility put Intuit at major risk, and keeping up with the business as it scaled was impossible. When Melanie Gallagher, Head of Third-Party Risk Management at Intuit, joined the team, she started to roll out methodologies for blocking merchant category codes and policy enforcement. However, the endless hours of manual audits across a small portion of hundreds of thousands of annual reports still loomed over the team.

We did the math and asked ourselves: 'If we were going to do a 100 percent manual expense report audit, how long and how many people would it take? We calculated it would take 40 people working full-time, eight hours a day, every day of the week.


Melanie Gallagher
Head of Third-Party Risk Management at Intuit

The time had come to find an AI-based solution that would audit 100% of reports in real-time and give Melanie's team the confidence to shift their focus to policy enforcement and the employee experience. 

 

Solution

Automation of unauthorized expenses, duplicates, and approvals

A seamless implementation of AppZen's Expense Audit allowed the team to redirect their daily work toward root-cause analysis. "AppZen has provided fascinating insights that we wouldn't have been able to piece together or even understand the full impact of," shared Gallagher. Powerful analytics allowed the team to pinpoint specific departments, countries, and employees that were the source of spending leakage and "address those issues tactically." 

With AppZen managing report approvals for low-risk items, operations shifted toward building a scalable framework that would automatically safeguard unauthorized expenses from being reimbursed in the future. Tailored customizations allowed the Intuit team to lean on AppZen to verify expense amounts by categories automatically, catch duplicates across and within reports, detect blocklisted merchants, and more.

Result

Scaled operations with nearly a quarter million dollars in savings

In the first 6 weeks of using AppZen, the team projected nearly $200,000 in savings. Melanie shares, "Instead of spending money on additional auditors, we're actually going to be able to identify savings opportunities that we can reinvest in the business." The team now only requires one auditor working part-time to review high-risk expenses. 

By partnering with AppZen, Intuit has achieved significant cost savings and gained unprecedented visibility into spending patterns, positioning the company for smarter financial decisions and sustainable growth in the years ahead. Melania concludes, "That is really promising and excites everybody."

Watch the full story here.