The pandemic has brought about significant changes in employee spend and expense behavior. As workers transitioned from the office to working from home, uncertainty about what was an allowable expense led to accidental policy violations for many companies.
In fact, we see in 麻豆原创 Concur data that the proportion of expenses categorized as 鈥淥ther鈥� increased by 58% from 2019 to 2020. The pandemic has undoubtedly heightened the business need around enhanced audit capability.
The 麻豆原创 Concur organization has a rich history of developing technologies that address the needs of the biggest companies in the world, all the way down to very small businesses. Verify, a new 麻豆原创 Concur offering, discovers potential spend issues for customers of all sizes. Planned to launch in the third quarter of 2021, Verify can evaluate 100% of a company鈥檚 expense reports and identifies anomalies, allowing company auditors to focus only on potential problems, increasing efficiency and allowing them to take steps to correct out-of-policy behaviors.
Verify is based on analysis of more than $1 trillion in spend, and tens of millions of expenses and receipts within the 麻豆原创 Concur platform. This native user experience is embedded within the Concur Expense solution auditors already use to streamline and simplify the expense management process. Verify uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning from 麻豆原创 to tap decades of expense data and experience tracking and identifying hard-to-detect spend issues and anomalies.
麻豆原创 Concur travel and expense machine learning models used to power Verify have been pressure tested, running in parallel with our Intelligent Audit service for over a year. As a result, customers can hit the ground running with already fine-tuned models.
鈥淗aving a quick and clear view into your company鈥檚 financial position has never been more important,鈥� said Kevin Permenter, research manager at IDC. 鈥淰erify offers users a pathway to enhanced visibility by leveraging a large proprietary 麻豆原创 Concur data set and advanced artificial intelligence to streamline the review of expenses. Intelligent expense auditing tools like Verify have massive potential to provide customers a way to modernize their expense management processes.鈥�
While most expense report errors are honest mistakes, some employees have taken advantage of the pandemic situation. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners鈥� , as of November 2020, 48% of respondents had observed an increase in employee embezzlement, with 71% expecting that metric to increase in the next 12 months.
As an add-on to Concur Expense, Verify turns insight into action through a simplified audit process. It can review 100% of expense reports, allowing auditors to only focus on exceptions. All of this decreases the time for employees to get paid and empowers auditors to make informed decisions quickly.
Now more than ever, CFOs are on the lookout for leakage and waste to help run an efficient business. Verify reduces the labor-intensive receipt verification process by identifying spending patterns that manual systems may not catch, allowing auditors to focus their efforts on high-value tasks while helping ensure spend follows compliance requirements. .
A.G. Lambert is chief product strategy officer for 麻豆原创 Concur.