Problem

Limited compliance and review from approving managers

Before implementing AppZen, Spectrum Brands lacked a dedicated auditing solution and relied solely on SAP Concur for expense management. Employees submitted expense reports, which were then routed to managers for approval. Any flagged exceptions were sent to the audit team for review. It was an inefficient process in need of a major change. Managers reviewed only 6% of all receipts, leaving many expenses unchecked. 

Nicole Wolff, Accounting Supervisor for T&E at Spectrum Brands, searched for solutions to improve the consistency and compliance of the company’s finance function. The results of the first audit solution the team put into place were disappointing—it took nearly 3 weeks for expense reports to move through the system and receive approval.

Spectrum Brands decided it was time to invest in AppZen’s Expense Audit to streamline its auditing process, reduce approval times, and ensure organizational compliance.

“The reason that we wanted to go with AppZen was the ease of use and implementation alongside Concur. We had a lot of things missing in our process, and things like finding duplicates couldn't be done by our team alone.”

 

Solution

A seamless integration with immediate time savings

Using AppZen’s integration to SAP Concur, Spectrum Brands seamlessly automated its existing processes with Expense Audit’s suite of helpful tools. In just a few weeks, they were able to start rolling out AppZen to their NAMER and Canada offices, while fine-tuning configurations along the way. Next came APAC and EMEA. Within 6 weeks, they had set up a global system that reduced their expense report processing from 2-3 weeks before AppZen, down to only 3 hours.

Over the first few months of using Expense Audit, they worked with a Customer Success Manager to analyze the source of high-spend categories and employees with a history of neglecting policies. And they used the AppZen AppStore to configure a set of models that allowed them to reach a 72% auto-approval rate without any human intervention within the first year of using AppZen.

Result

Audit team resources focused on analytical tasks

With a customized process in place, Nicole’s audit team gained back over 600 working hours, annually. They used that valuable time to track audit performance and make model adjustments based on the historical data of approved versus rejected expenses. Models with the biggest impact included: 

Duplicate Across Reports, which identifies and flags a receipt transaction as high risk if it appears in multiple reports, even if it is submitted at different times.

Cashline Validation, which checks whether a corporate credit card has been misused by an employee for personal or out-of-pocket expenses.

Monitored Employees Audit, which flags incoming expense reports from employees with a history of expense violations, risky or fraudulent business behavior, or who work in sensitive roles.

Personal Expense Detection, which allows auditors to flag personal expense items on corporate cards, allowing them to track and control spending at the time of payment.

Looking Ahead

Expanding automation across finance operations

In just over a year, Spectrum Brands has transformed its expense management process, reducing report processing time from 2-3 weeks to just 3 hours and achieving a 72% auto-approval rate. The team continues to optimize their use of AppZen’s capabilities, with particular focus on the Employee Compliance Dashboard for monitoring high-risk transactions and patterns. Using insights from cash submission analysis and implementing strategic thresholds for different spend categories, they’ve created multiple layers of automated oversight that catch issues before they escalate.

Next, Spectrum Brands plans to expand their AppZen implementation to include additional AI Automations from AppZen, deepen their analytics capabilities, and further automate manager-level processes. With a strong foundation and proven results, the team continues driving efficiency gains across their global finance operations.