Team Insights eliminated employees’ non-compliant spend, reduced workflows, and shortened employee reimbursement time at a global e-commerce corporation challenged by complex reporting hierarchies and distributed teams.
INDUSTRY
E-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence
EMPLOYEES
Over 1M employees worldwide, organized into thousands of global teams and departments
APPZEN PRODUCTS
AppZen Expense Audit
THE PROBLEM
There was no visibility around team spend
In this globally distributed organization, team reporting hierarchies are typically complex. Managing T&E expenses presents significant challenges for team managers and finance leaders. More importantly, with over a million employees, it was very time-consuming for managers to review each team member’s receipts to ensure they were in compliance with company policies. This led to managers blindly approving over 80% of receipts without a proper review. There was no visibility around team spend across disparate locations, nor around the impact of wasteful or non-compliant team and employee spend on the corporation.
It was imperative to the organization to find solutions to the following problems:
- Remove managers from the time-consuming need to check direct reports’ individual expenses across multiple geographies and currencies, while enforcing corporate controls and SOX compliance.
- Find an easy way for managers and finance leaders to quickly review their teams’ spend so they could track trends and exceptions, benchmark their team’s expenses against department budgets, and quickly identify employees’ high-risk spend in order to take immediate action.
THE SOLUTION
Accurate monitoring of individual and overall team spend
AppZen’s Expense Audit technology was already helping customize policies to meet changing business needs, realize major cost savings, and increase efficiency across the entire T&E operation. This organization is known for pushing the envelope, however, and wanted to drive even greater productivity. With over 250,000 expense reports sent for processing every month, this challenge required an innovative solution. AppZen Team Insights was implemented across all global locations so managers could accurately monitor individual and overall team spend across various currencies, business units, and regions – all from a single dashboard.
The Team Insights dashboard contains 10 different charts and graphs highlighting detailed metrics for both teams and individual staff members, such as category spend per team member or how much spend was high-risk, based on company policies. Team Insights also allowed the organization to customize data, including: date range, manager, cost center, report status, organizations, policies, payment type, and direct reports. This single source of truth provided on-demand analysis of all teams’ spend within the organization, with drill-down capabilities to pinpoint anything that was out of policy. Managers were also sent monthly email reports, highlighting their departments’ highest-risk spenders. By proactively catching anomalies, managers and finance leaders could take immediate action to enable the appropriate expense workflow for remediating and reducing non-compliant spend before it became a problem.
THE RESULT
Focused awareness of their team’s overall spend
Implementing AppZen Expense Audit and the Team Insights gave managers and finance leaders a focused awareness of their team’s overall spend and its impact on the organization. In six months, the organization effectively eliminated blind and negligent “rubber stamp” approvals. Because Expense Audit thoroughly examines 100% of expenses, automatically approves low- and medium-risk expenditures, and flags high-risk items for review, managers could focus on the most significant areas of spend. AppZen Team Insights also allowed the company to:
- Remove the need for manager approval from the workflow for low-and medium-risk expenses, while maintaining spend controls and compliance with a high degree of accuracy, giving managers more time for effective leadership.
- Become Finance SOX compliant with automatic receipt approval.
- Meet the CFO’s initiative of reimbursing employees faster. Repayment time decreased 75%, from an average of 7 days down to 1.81 days – 2x times faster than the industry average.
LOOKING AHEAD
Leveling up a successful, global e-commerce corporation
Through Team Insights, the organization now has one source of truth that reflects overall spend across every one of its global teams – all accessible via a single, on-demand dashboard.