Travel & Expense Monitoring
5 Things that Make Auditing Expense Reports a Total Pain

Expense report auditing remains a highly manual, difficult process for many organizations. So much so that many just skip it. Aberdeen reports that less than two-thirds of organizations regularly conduct audits of expense reports. That’s a scary notion considering T&E is the second-largest corporate expense behind payroll.
Below are the top five things that make auditing expense reports painful, and how you can overcome these challenges. Expense report audit does not have to be besieged with difficulty.
What to do about it? Streamline how employees enter expenses so auditors don’t have to see another paper receipt. Ditch the spreadsheets and get an expense management solution like Concur or Certify to automate your expense report entry. Then use an Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution to automatically analyze 100% of transactions in a comprehensive risk-based audit.
What to do about it? Open lines of communication with stakeholders in other departments about your T&E policies. Talk to finance, operations, and HR. Most importantly, talk to your employees who travel often to uncover their pain points and preferences. Engaging the right people will let you know where to focus and get them to buy into your policy.
What to do about it? The best AI tools won’t just find the transaction exceptions in expense reports, they’ll find patterns of behavior that need to be corrected and the root cause of the problem. When the system detects a high-risk activity, it automatically assigns it to the audit team for remediation in a case management system that prioritizes cases, provides a case research workflow and documents steps taken to resolve cases. This enables better communication with employees and better documentation for demonstrating compliance.
What to do about it? Take the burden out of the expense report process by automating end-to-end. Use expense management software to create expense reports and an automated expense report audit solution to detect fraud and misuse. Many companies find that automating more of the process makes employees happier too because they can process and reimburse expenses faster. Many companies can move to weekly reimbursements because they are not held hostage to end of month madness.
What to do about it? Again, automation saves the day. As your workforce grows and the number of expense reports grows, automated expense report auditing scales without adding headcount. Auditors are free to focus on correcting problems such as repeat offenders and fraud instead of just verifying receipts in a random sample.
Many of the things that make auditing expense reports so awful can be easily overcome with automation. If you feel the pain of expense report audits, we should talk.
Schedule a demo of Oversight’s automated expense report audit solution.
Oversight Press releases.