AppZen, a San Jose, California-based provider of software for auditing expenses using artificial intelligence technology, has introduced Mastermind Analytics to identify spending risks, provide benchmarks on demand, and give finance teams more visibility into behavior patterns so they can spot areas of improvement.
The system leverages AI technology to automate the auditing process for invoices and spending data to provide more insights into wasteful spending behavior, extracting information from documents. The software includes more than 30 charts covering current cross-system spending, risk and operational performance. It allows companies to benchmark themselves against peer organizations, as well as create dashboards for specific use cases, metrics and teams.
“We are excited to offer this unique analytics capability as part of the AppZen AI software suite of products,” said AppZen CEO Anant Kale (pictured) in a statement Wednesday. “Finance teams will now have access to previously unavailable out-of-policy spend information that enables immediate visibility into patterns and activity that could indicate, and prevent, more complex risks of fraud and waste.”
Business users can build their own customer dashboards and charts without requiring outside help from the IT department to aggregate data.
Mastermind Analytics builds on AppZen’s existing expense-auditing software and is now available to AppZen AI Finance Platform users.
“AppZen Expense Audit’s superpower is to understand the unstructured finance data, enrich that data with more context through Star Match, and be able to do that at scale for 100 percent of the expenses,” said AppZen product marketer Chi-Hsuan Wu. “The power of Mastermind Analytics is to unlock that insight so finance teams can take action. Whatever the needed action, one can use Mastermind to tailor fit expense policies to fit the organization. An example of this is after 100 percent of the expenses are audited by AppZen Expense Audit, a finance executive can use Mastermind Analytics’ benchmarking feature to see how his/her T&E process compares against companies in their industry. The finance executive discovered that there’s a lot of high-risk spend in the U.K. professional services department for flights, and that’s due to the team’s coverage for all of Europe. Using Mastermind, as long as the flights are booked via the corporate travel agency and have a valid project code, the expense can be streamlined for approval, thus reducing the audit team’s queue by 30 percent.”
Both accountants and auditors can make use of the features. “An accountant or auditor can leverage the power of Mastermind Analytics in a number of ways,” said Wu. “Other than the ability to benchmark and dig deeper into expenses, another way for accountants or auditors to use Mastermind Analytics is to gain more insights on policy compliance. An example of this is Mastermind Analytics can aggregate the number of times an individual has submitted expenses just under the approval threshold and at risk of abusing company funds.”
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