Southwest Airlines Finds Success Automating Expense Monitoring

Business Challenge

Southwest Airlines uses Oversight to monitor its travel and expense and purchasing transactions. Learn how the airline saved time, caught errors and fraud they could not find before, and improved employee spending behavior in this testimonial from Jennifer Gruich, who oversees Southwest Airline’s corporate card and expense program.

Southwest Airlines uses a one-card program that combines T&E and purchasing into one card. Before bringing on Oversight, the airline used a manual audit process. They tried to pull in risky merchant types and category codes, but because they were only analyzing a sample of the data, they knew a lot of cash leakage was slipping by.

Solution

All travel, expense, and purchasing transactions are now run through the Oversight system. With Oversight analyzing 100% of transactions and flagging and prioritizing potential errors, risk, and fraud, the Southwest team can focus on transactions that pose the greatest risk.

Results

Southwest recovered $60,000 in duplicate payments alone in its first year with Oversight and has recovered $289,000 in T&E reimbursements since 2017 (as of year-end 2022). Overall, Oversight has analyzed $590 million in T&E spend across 1.2 million transactions. Oversight discovered $9.1M in confirmed T&E findings across 3,413 unique cardholders. 

Benefits

In addition to money and time savings, Southwest uses Oversight’s communication tool, which allows the team to converse with employees to let them know when they are out of compliance, request information, and keep a record of each incident in one system. Using this tool, Southwest has engaged with 8,800 unique employees through 2022, helping to improve awareness and behavior.