Travel & Expense Monitoring
Harnessing AI and the Power of Patterns to Transform Your T&E Audit Process

Earlier waves of travel and expense (T&E) audit technology largely automated elements of the manual review. For example, audit functionality would flag all expense reports above $2,000. It would also flag reports that lacked detail about attendees at business meals.
While this made aspects of the T&E review faster, it did nothing to elevate the overall effectiveness of the review to better identify and prevent key T&E risk, such as fraud, waste, and misuse.
It simply flagged reports for review based on various criteria, resulting in hours spent scanning reports that pose no problems whatsoever.
Now, artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming the industry and reshaping best practices. Organizations can now fully automate report review and focus exclusively on remediating transactions that have been identified as problematic, no longer wasting time searching for non-compliance.
Not only can AI drastically reduce the time you invest in T&E controls, it can also automatically detect broader areas of risk than any individual auditor ever could. With the power of AI, automated expense audit solutions can run thousands of tests in parallel across your entire T&E data set.
Focus on High-Risk Repeat Offenders
Instead of manually auditing one expense report at a time, AI solutions like Oversight Insights On Demand® analyze the entire data set, reviewing all transactions by an individual traveler and comparing them to all other employees across all time.
Based on our analysis of $1.9 trillion in annual spending, Oversight has found that about 5% of employees generate 95% of all high-risk activity in T&E programs. Unfortunately, this group of repeat offenders goes largely undetected with current-state controls, which aren’t designed to detect patterns of high-risk activity.
In any given program, we observe 25% of employees engaging in waste and misuse. These generally aren’t bad employees and they’re certainly not committing fraud. But they’re not good stewards of your corporate T&E spend. Lastly, about 70% of employees follow your T&E policies to the letter. These are your model citizens.
Leveraging the power of patterns, machine learning, and data analytics, Oversight detects high-risk transactions, identifies repeat offenders, and prioritizes your expense audit workflow by:
This targeted approach has enabled hundreds of Oversight clients to transform their T&E audit process and achieve three major outcomes:
This is part 2 of a two-part blog series based on the Oversight webinar, Leveraging AI and the Power of Patterns to Transform Your T&E Audit Process. Part 1 focuses on Why Your Expense Audit Process is Broken, and How to Fix It.
By viewing the webinar, you will learn:
Chris Elliott is a senior solutions consultant with Oversight Systems.