Reduce spend

Shrink your spend. Remove errors and waste. Catch and eliminate fraud, prepayment. All with the superhuman strength of AI-powered auditing.

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Errors, waste, and fraud are hiding out in your spend border

Managing spend is no small task. Your company’s spend is growing, but you don’t have enough staff to make sure the expense reports you’re reimbursing and the invoices you’re paying are accurate. You may be relying on sample-based auditing for employees’ T&E expenses and two- or three-way matching to validate invoice-based spend, but are you finding all of the errors, waste, and fraud that’s there? In a typical enterprise, as much as five percent of operating expenses is the result of duplicate expense claims, human errors, overpaid invoices, expense-invoice crossover, employee cheating, and even fraudulent supplier payments. That’s real money lost.

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Reduce T&E spend border

When it comes to T&E spend, employees aren’t always paying close attention when they create expense reports. They may make mistakes on the expense line, attach the wrong receipt, or accidentally re-submit an expense from last month in this month’s report. Most organizations don’t have the audit crew or time to go through every single report with a fine-toothed comb and make sure all of the spend is correct…and legitimate.

And what about deliberate fraud? Two employees knowingly expensing the same meal? Employees padding cash spend? People submitting fake receipts? Honest mistakes are one thing, but cheating and fraud are another because they can turn into something bigger. Someone who’s willing to cheat on expenses may be ready to engage in an invoice fraud scheme that could cost your company millions or land you on the front page of today's news (and not in a good way).

To reduce T&E spend, what’s required is a way to verify all of your employees’ expense reports so you can catch problem spend before paying people back. You need to catch duplicate receipts, weekend or personal spend, wasteful behavior, over-the-limit expenses, and more. You need to do it in a scalable way, consistently every time, and with unlimited memory.

The best way to accomplish this is with AI-powered expense auditing from AppZen. Our platform gives you the x-ray vision and heroic strength you need to eliminate these common problems, all before you pay a cent.

This helps me bend my cost curve.”

CFO, FINANCIAL SERVICES

Reduce invoice-based spend border

When it comes to invoice-based spend, many organizations find it very hard to audit all spend prior to payment. You may have a manual invoice approvals process or automated matching that validates an invoice’s price and units against those in a purchase order and receipt (or both!). Even if that’s the case, chances are there are tons of exceptions: a purchase may not be associated with a PO, your approver may “rubber stamp” an invoice and not really take the time to see if it is accurate, and scammers may bypass your system’s validation process.

Invoice fraud is no small issue, either. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the two main contributors to occupational fraud are check and payment tampering and billing. Common examples of invoice fraud are CEO or executive impersonation, vendor impersonation, and shell companies. It’s critical that you uncover fraud quickly, especially if your employees are involved. Bad actors start small and escalate from there, so the fraud you find today could be just the tip of the iceberg. The ACFE calculates that fraud schemes lasting more than five years are 20 times as costly as those caught in the first six months.

To reduce business spend, what’s required is a way to audit invoices automatically. You need to catch duplicate spend, crossover with T&E, invoices that are missing loyalty or volume discounts you negotiated, and of course, fraud. You need to do it before you pay and without disrupting your company’s fast pace.

The best way to accomplish this is with AI-powered invoice and contract auditing from AppZen. Our platform gives you the power to wipe out bad spend from your invoice process.

We found a $66,000 invoice for spend that had previously been reimbursed over several expense reports.

DIRECTOR OF FINANCE,
AUTO MANUFACTURING

$100k

MEDIAN INVOICE FRAUD SCHEME SOURCE: ACFE

Key Capabilities

Audit 100% of spend, prepayment

Audit 100% of spend instantly, before you pay a cent.

Enforce discounts and payment terms

Take advantage of the discounts and payment terms you negotiated hard for.

Catch duplicate spend

Find duplicate spend in expenses, invoices, and expense-invoice crossover.

Identify suspicious activity

Catch suspicious spend patterns in employee expenses and vendor invoices.

Avoid waste and overcharges

Flag wasteful spend and supplier overcharges by validating against internal business systems and external signals.

Weed out errors and fraud

Find and stamp out both legitimate errors and outright fraud from your T&E and invoice-based spend.

 

AI Gurus: Intuit

Intuit is increasing its global procurement savvy with AI. The company uses AppZen to understand and shape employee spend behavior and create a culture of compliance.

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