Happay leveraging AI and ML to tackle expense management challenges

While managing economic growth has always been challenging for CFOs, transparency and a bird’s eye view of their expenses during the process are something every finance leader appreciates.

The 2022 Global CFO survey report by WNS, where over 300 CFOs were polled, suggests that more than 70% recognize the need to leverage digital technologies to improve effectiveness, efficiencies, and stakeholder experience as a top priority. This is where disruptive technologies such as OCR (Optical Character Recognition), Artificial Intelligence(AI), and Machine Learning (ML) play a significant role.

Incorporating AI/ML into an enterprise’s financial technology can help CFOs spot patterns and trends in expense that humans are not trained to do. Further, it does not hurt that mundane physical activities (read rummaging through physical receipts) become less time-consuming and completely error-free.

Happay’s AI and ML-powered expense management solution allows CFOs to be strategically proactive as they turn towards data-backed insights on expenses.

How does Happay back up CFOs with what they need to ace the expense management game?

Ease and Accuracy with Happay’s Xpendite

As Himanshu Singh, Senior Vice President, Happay, says, “in today’s market flux, CFOs require speed, accuracy, and ease of working to ensure their organizations stay productive and competitive-way beyond what humans are capable of delivering.”

Some of the most frustrating elements in corporate business travel for CFOs and their finance teams are lost receipts, inaccurate filing, and unclaimed GST, causing delays in closing their books.

Happay’s Xpendite uses AI to ensure that all relevant data is collected from the source. So, whether it is a scanned image, picture in your phone’s gallery, credit card statements, email, travel apps, or SMS, Xpendite picks it up automatically and accurately.

Accurate expense data capture eliminates expense fraud. No more paper receipts mean a better experience for finance teams and users overall. However, the most significant plus points for CFOs and finance teams are the faster expense reconciliations and 100% input GST claims.

Policy violations and fraud are a thing of the past with SmartAudit

Typically, expense fraud is episodic (therefore, does not leave a data trail) and may be in small numbers, making it hard to identify, foresee and control. Further, non-compliant claims add to reimbursement turnaround time and reconciliation efforts.

One way to address these is to increase awareness and promote self-enforcement. However, is it realistic to expect self-enforcement to work in large organizations with complex workflows?

As Ramesh Iyer, president & Chief Revenue Officer at Happay, says, “ AI and ML-based expense management systems can eliminate non-compliant claims, fraud, and the lack of control in workflows, improving compliance rates quickly and effectively.”

Happay’s AI-assisted SmartAudit feature ensures that the bookings or expense claims are verified against your policies before approval. Besides notifications/alerts, SmartAudit offers the convenience of two features- “hard blocks” and “soft blocks.”

Hard blocks prevent an employee from proceeding further in an expense claim. On the other hand, a soft block pushes the claim forward to an approver, who decides if such a claim can be approved/rejected.

Whether it is a non-compliant claim or a mismatch (between scanned invoice and actual claim), CFOs or finance teams can address these effectively at the earliest.

Leveraging the power of analytics

Expense analysis, reports, and other charts that give CFOs the lowdown on the organization’s use of resources are the backbone of any finance operation. But how can finance leaders access numbers that will allow them to make better predictions and forecasts?

CFOs must explore AI-based expense management solutions to add value and provide a competitive edge to their organization.

For instance, Happay’s T&E solution helps finance teams with comprehensive reporting. The OCR technology extracts information from scanned images (receipts and invoices) and makes sense of data such as timestamps, currencies, expense types, etc.

The more significant contribution of these technologies is visible in analytics. As finance teams examine, categorize and analyze large and diverse amounts of data, they uncover data correlations, trends, and patterns, that offer more visibility and control to financial leaders.

In conclusion

It is said that Indian enterprises are adopting these modern technologies at a rate of 65% (greater than the global average of 54%).

In times when technology fuels business growth, what enterprises need is a partner who can help them navigate the changing landscapes and consumer behavior efficiently. Recognized for its efforts by India’s CIOs and digital leaders, Happay was awarded the CIO CHOICE 2023 for Travel and Expense Management.

Happay is perfectly poised to provide CFOs with what they need to scale the travel and expense challenge. As the only company offering a 4th generation T&E management solution, Happay gives CFOs the advantage of customizing modern technologies to boost the finance team’s efficiencies and productivity.

 

 

 

 

 

(Above mentioned article is a sponsored feature, This article is a paid publication and does not have journalistic/editorial involvement of IDPL, and IDPL claims no responsibility whatsoever)