Expense management is time-consuming and cumbersome. But beyond that – expenses are surprisingly easy to falsify. According to the 2024 Report to the Nations by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), the average loss from an expense report fraud scheme is $50,000. To make matters worse, more than half of occupational fraud is due to a lack of internal controls and is much more likely to go unnoticed when an AP process is paper-based.
Automated AP solutions transform expense management into a transparent and secure process. Not only can approvers verify expense claims in real-time and flag claims that are outside of company policy, but AP automation can separate the reporters from the approvers and ensure the right level of oversight for each one.
Here’s how to solve three common expense management challenges with AP automation.
Falsification
Employee fraud is more common than you might think, and that includes lying on expense claims. From faking receipts to inflating prices, to double-dipping, the ACFE revealed that the longer an employee has worked for their organization, the more costly the fraud is likely to be.
AP automation improves transparency throughout the entire workflow, helping stop fraud before it starts. Approvers can verify expense claims in real-time and flag claims that are outside of the company policy, while digitization helps eliminate the reliance on easily forged paper documentation.
Error-prone
The Global Business Travel Association estimates that 18% of expense reports contain errors, which each take an average of 18 minutes to correct at an average cost of $52.
AP automation offers customized expense receipt categories that map to your general ledger (GL) codes. This eliminates the risk of manual keying errors while minimizing the back-and-forth confusion between employees and approvers over inaccurate or incomplete submissions.
Expensive
The Global Business Travel Association also estimates that it takes 20 minutes for an average company to process a single expense report. Add to that the cost of common delays in filing, approving, and reimbursement, as well as fixing inaccuracies and errors – and many expense reports end up costing far more than their actual amounts.
An AP automation solution empowers employees to quickly and easily upload receipts and create expense reports from anywhere. Approvers receive automatic notifications and can dig into the details and approve or reject a report — almost in real-time. This makes the entire process both cost and time efficient.
AP automation streamlines expense management
The pressure to manage and control expense-related data means finance teams need the right solution to help identify trends and areas of concern in employee spend.
AP automation from Quadient AP digitizes the entire expense management process, empowering finance teams with oversight and more opportunities to analyze data and reduce costs.
Here’s how Quadient AP can optimize your expense management workflow:
- Increased efficiency: A cloud-based system ensures expense management is faster and more tightly controlled.
- Customized approval routing: Oversight helps mitigate fraud while enhancing compliance.
- End-to-end visibility: Employee spending patterns can be reviewed and compared for all departments, locations, or legal entities — as soon as expenses come in.
- Digital payments: Online reimbursement is faster and eliminates the reliance on paper checks.
Book a demo with our Quadient AP team today to see how automated expense management can streamline your AP workflows and reduce cost for your business.
