AI and Open Banking, the future of Expense & Spend Management

Only half of business automate expenses

If you currently use software to manage company expenses then you're one of only 53% of businesses doing so; it can be a time-consuming process, many who use their own manual system for collecting and recording staff expenses can take around 8 days out of each month.

A leading online expense management solution

Thankfully there are solutions available in the UK that can manage up to a 75% saving, by reducing processing down to 2 days.

Expense Once is one of them, a progressive web app that's been built from the ground up by a team focusing on delivering maximum value, through modern, engaging design, as well as leveraging the very latest technology.

Corporate Card Expenses - Integration with All Major Banks

Here at Expense Once we've spent 6 months on two R&D projects, which together, can almost fully automate the entire process of cash and card expenses. If you're familiar with card expenses some systems use electronic statements per account per month to upload into the software, staff then able to attach receipts, select a category and complete the form before submitting.

Expense Once has now replaced this using Open Banking, a UK standard for providing banking services to third-party businesses. We provide a transaction feed directly to the card-holders, whether there's one or several accounts, which automatically generates expense reports during the month.

They're available through both expense mobile or desktop and as expenses are generated an alert is sent to each relative card-holder, indicating their expenses are ready to be reviewed and submitted.

Receipt Assist with Artificial Intelligence

We were an early adopter of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), implemented back in 2017 which enabled the software to 'read' the receipt as it's captured via the mobile device. The software could then automatically populate the expense form, unfortunately the technology has a number of limitations which is made worse as we can't fully control the quality of the receipt image; if you've ever used OCR for receipts its a feature that quote often requires manual update or correction by the user.

We quickly moved our attention elsewhere, as such, we've been working of delivering an entirely new and cutting-edge approach with Artificial Intelligence and machine learning that recognises the receipt structure and text format, whether its an image, PDF or even hand-written.

So far it's incredibly accurate, achieving a 94% accuracy rate over the first 1,000 images we've passed through it. A great improvement on the 73% achieved using OCR alone.

Combining AI and OCR is our first step towards providing full AI services within the accounting process and the analysis of company spend in general. We're spending time developing ways to use AI that will improve our software and services for you, just sign up below to up-to-date on our progress.

Expenses that are automatically itemised

As transactions are received from the bank they are categorised and receipts are matched with our auto-assist service.As Receipts are uploaded by card-holders OCR reads the merchant, date, currency, amount and description, together we highlight what information has or hasn't been matched as positive or negativeicon which the card-holder can simply approve before submitting.

Card expenses have never been so easy!

Card Limit Notifications - even more value

If you set spend limits for card-holders they'll receive an alert if they reach certain thresholds, these can be configured, but default limits are 50%, 75%, 90% of the limit. In many cases this helps to reduce spend but also keeps the claimant informed of the issue.