For a long time, Oversight did things quite differently when it came to helping others monitor their T&E spending for fraud, waste, and misuse. Previously, we’d get the data from the customers, analyze it, and churn out thousands of exceptions. We’ve always been able to quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively identify instances of non-compliant spending. As an added bonus, the predictive analytics embedded within our software got better at monitoring for trends and facts over time.
After we moved to our Oversight Insights on Demand™ model in 2012, we began to do more research into our customers: who they are, what they bought, and most importantly, why they bought from us. As it turns out, customers weren’t buying from us because they had a laundry list of items they wanted to look for within their data (the needles within the haystacks, if you will), they bought because our software could tell them the patterns of what they should be looking for, and best of all, lead them to those patterns better than anyone else.
Building upon the idea that we needed to be more prescriptive with our customers, we’ve been honing our product even further. Our latest software release features new “Trend Analytics,” a dashboard/scorecard feature that alerts users to the top big picture issues our software finds within their data. I’ve often called it the “Wall Street Journal” headlines of what we found in your expense data, but it is also a list of items you can follow up and take action on.
We’re not looking for the singular expense report with the typical types of bad activity we see, such as duplicate expenses, suspicious out-of-pocket reimbursement just under the limit, or transactions that took place over the weekend. We are looking for the patterns within the data that point out the bad actors, areas within the policy that need improvement, and gathering data for benchmarking; the type that can truly impact an organization’s bottom line.
After making this small but significant shift to being more prescriptive, Oversight and its customers are no longer doing data analysis for the sake of shoring up compliance or checking the boxes of your annual/monthly/weekly expense audit. In becoming more prescriptive, we’ve been able to craft a more meaningful type of analysis product for our customers while creating a big-picture data view that helps them make smarter business decisions every day.
