Eliminating The Excess In T&E Spending

Companies increasingly doing business in locations beyond the purview of headquarters must keep an eye on expenses — on the charges employees make on the road, from meals to hotels to taxi cabs. More than that, firms must make sure expense reports submitted by employees are accurate, ensuring that what is being spent is being spent on what is being claimed by employees.

Oversight Systems, an expense analysis technology firm, said last week that it has released a new iteration of its Insights On Demand web-based app, through which artificial intelligence is deployed to help identify spending by corporate employees that can be deemed fraudulent or noncompliant with the firm’s expense policy.

In an interview with PYMNTS, Nathanael L’Heureux, vice president of product management at Oversight, stated that the fact remains that, in manual review, executives “typically view only one report at a time, or a few at a time, and so they miss the trends,” or perhaps their attention may be tied to the highest-dollar value items, having overlooked what might be smaller (though cumulatively significant) wasteful expenses.

Alerts are conveyed through dashboards that can be configured to different users or to different parameters of spending (such as meals or travel).

To that end, the executive told PYMNTS, the newest software update can drill down into what is known as Level 3 data, which ties in with spending that is transacted across corporate cards. That level of detail can help expense management track purchases down to the most detailed line item, helping to ensure that employees are indeed buying what they are stating on their expense reports (which does also help with B2B transactions) beyond simple details, such as price or location.

The firm has also said that, now, T&E managers have the ability to search what can be classified as “suspicious keywords” as firms become increasingly global in scope and must monitor spending in other countries (or units in other countries) and those keywords can cut across more than a dozen languages. T&E managers can also gain insight into daily meal spend, with an eye toward flagging noncompliance, and can view details as nuanced as who was present at meals in order to determine whether per diem levels have been breached — especially if multiple employees have been present at the same meals during the same day.