Generative AI and expense management.

AI in the spotlight.

AI is changing the way we work. Research by Goldman Sachs suggests investment in AI could approach $100 billion in the U.S. and $200 billion globally by 2025. And with good reason — Accenture studies predict that companies who adopt AI could be 38% more profitable by 2035.

That’s not surprising considering the amount of manual work done by finance teams — over 50% of their time in some organizations!

An EY report, Six ways the CFO can use artificial intelligence, today, points out that finance teams are well-positioned to leverage the powers of AI. “Perhaps no part of the enterprise has as many repetitive, routine tasks as the finance department,” states the report. By incorporating AI capabilities into expense reporting, employees will also benefit by being freed from tedious manual processes.

Fewer errors with AI.

Manual data entry and categorizations are prone to errors, which in turn cost organizations money and time. AI and machine learning excel at automating error-free data capture and categorization, and can even detect inaccuracies and miscalculated expenses. They also don’t experience the kind of mid-afternoon energy crashes or distractions that lead to unintended human error.

Touchless expense reporting with OCR.

One of our goals was to marry our existing optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities with AI to further enhance the user experience.

All you have to do is take a photo of or upload a receipt, and OCR technology will extract the details. From there, generative AI compiles an expense report by auto-filling all the details including the expense GL coding and its memo field with a description — a smart capability that stands Airbase apart from all the expense management solutions in the market. And, all this smart auto-filling happens within the blink of an eye — not for 1-2 expenses but multiple expenses in a report in parallel.

Imagine: Instead of pouring through receipts, deciphering expense policies, and filling out long forms, you can rely on AI-based OCR technology and generative AI to submit a correct expense report easily and quickly.

We all know that business trips can generate a lot of receipts, so the true value in terms of time saved is the ability to process multiple receipts at once, compiling them into automated, accurate reports and submit for approvals.

With Airbase’s Expense Management module, you snap pictures of your receipts from the mobile app as soon as you incur them, add them to a report, quickly review the auto-filled details, and submit whenever you’re ready — that’s it! No more spending hours on weekends to submit expense reports for all your business trips!

AI and audit readiness.

For AI to analyze submitted expenses and ensure the correct coding and categorization, and to detect anomalies in data, it’s important to have one reliable single source of truth with consistent data standards. With these standards in place, Airbase ensures compliance and compiles the required documentation for every transaction in an automated audit trail. It’s rewarding to know that our product enhancements save time, stress, and money. We’re continuing to expand both our Expense Management module and our AI capabilities as technology advances.

Want to see our Expense Management module in action? Take a self-guided tour!