AppZen Automates Expense Report Approval

In 2017, Certify president Bob Neveu told BTN, “There’s a big difference between [being able to] flag exceptions, incorrect or fraudulent expenses versus just auto-approval and instant reimbursement. ... No customer is looking for that.” To the contrary, artificial intelligence-powered expense audit company AppZen thinks that market is out there.

The startup now automates expense approval, using AI to audit and then remove approving managers from the equation when no violations are found. The firm suggests that expense managers cascade that approval into "same-day reimbursement" through an integrated expense management system. AppZen "can trigger those approvals since we auto-determine if the report has no violations," a spokesperson said.  The startup piloted the feature "heavily" with four clients and more than 40,000 approving managers and users globally.

Several expense management firms, including Certify and Expensify, have automated parts of the approval process, along with other functions like matching receipts to credit card charges and creating and submitting expense reports for users. While some tech-forward companies are comfortable with that level of automation, many have hesitated to adopt automated approval, according to Expensify CEO David Barrett. And rather than pursue additional automation, Expensify has focused lately on perfecting its more traditional features set. 

AppZen is going all the way. CEO Anant Kale previously told BTN the tool uses AI and machine learning to "mimic auditors by checking everything as if a human with all the time in the world were checking it and looking on the internet for clues but in real time." Not only are a larger number of out-of-policy expenses getting caught, but recurring compliant expenses are also being evaluated quicker as the system learns, according to the company.   

When that detailed accuracy is combined with automatic approvals, expense program managers could feel more at ease that unauthorized expenses won't accidentally be approved. 

AppZen also launched Insights, a data reporting dashboard that shows trends and expense reimbursement behaviors over time. "Managers already had access to the raw data. This just displays it in a more effective way to track behaviors and trends over time," the spokesperson said. "Until now, managers have never been able to see team-centric spend data by violations, [spend] types and unauthorized [charges]." 

Correction: A previous version of this article quoted an inaccurate cost structure for the expense audit and automated approval tool. That reference has been removed. BTN regrets the error.