Travel expense management is the key in knowing how and where travelling employees of a company are spending money, and how any organization can improve the process of managing travel costs, as a whole. Managing data by preserving paper receipts and making expense reports to comply with the travel policy are all a thing of the past. These days, travel managers needn’t have to be super tech-savvy, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) gives them easy ways to do away with the hassle of manual management.
AI can not only create and record expenditure and expenses reports, but can understand and approve workflows, eliminate reimbursement fraud, and generate and detail out expense data for organizations for the purpose of budgeting. Therefore, optimizing travel expenses with AI is a structured way to fully automate the reporting of travel expenses and tracking methods.
Machine learning is a type of AI that allows systems to learn without having to program them to do so. AI algorithms help derive and extract the required information if you simply have an image of the receipt. OCR can convert the printed text that you find on bills into machine encoded text, storing it as data. AI not only makes short work of employees reporting expenses, but brings all types of expenses under a single platform.
AI bots can check for policy violations, and if they find anything suspicious on the expenses front, it can put a flag on it immediately so that the management team can address and fix the issue in real time. It even requests clarifications if travel policy expenses are violated, and by this, any approver mediation is kept to bare minimum. Only when the system finds the justifications insufficient, it will seek inputs at the approver’s end, and then he or she can either accept or reject the expenses claims.
The report generated is of high accuracy with utterly no expenses that one cannot claim. This means employees do not have to spend time developing elaborate spreadsheets, and accountants receive absolutely error-free reports that are uniformly formatted for greater understanding.
The AI engine has the ability to analyse expenses and attributes for the detection of patterns and anomalies, offering organization with specific information that can be used to reduce travel costs.
The AI engine stores data—in our case, one that is related to travel expenses —as historical claims under copious data sets that are called ‘Big data’. Big data is generally analyzed by a system to understand the several trends and patterns associated with it, and this can only become efficient with the sheer volume of data generally recorded.
The machine learning algorithms can recognise numbers and patterns, generates analytical reports concerning travel expenses, and offers organizations greater visibility for controlling business spends. The biggest advantage is that it gives companies greater flexibility in cost-reduction, thereby helping them to establish clear priorities in realizing their business and financial objectives.
The use of AI, as we can understand so far in this case, is not just about automating expense management, but leveraging employees’ time to narrow down focus on doing critical activities. Thus expense reporting is more dynamic, mobile and flexible in nature, simply at the click of a button. The biggest takeway is the increased compliance rate when it comes to checking automated policy and audit trails. Organizations can now mop up non-compliant employees based on the nature of the report. With a proper expense analytics tool in place, you can reduce the travel cost further by looking into the several associated trends, numbers and stats.
With use of bots, AI and travel data analytics, Tripeur App is a real game changer that can not only control travel expenses but allow seamless flow of other critical business operations in an organization, thereby enabling companies to perform smarter.