RSMUS.comWelcome back to our ongoing series about the AI-driven solutions being added to Sage Intacct. We’ve previously covered general ledger outlier detection and Sage Copilot. In this entry, we focus on employee expense automation and all the exciting ways it saves time, money, and mistakes.
Introducing Employee Expense Automation for Sage Intacct
Technology has made tracking employee expenses increasingly easier over the years, benefiting both employees and accountants. Still, it hasn’t made this time-consuming process feel effortless and automatic—until now.
Employee expense automation, now part of Sage Intacct, takes an important but often annoying process and puts it on autopilot.
It used to be the case that employees would hunt down all their receipts, locate details such as amount, time, and vendor, and then manually key the data into an expense report. It was time-consuming, prone to errors and omissions, and a regular distraction. Now, the AI in Sage Intacct can eliminate all but the first step.
Here’s how it works: Employees email their receipts (photos or electronic copies) to a dedicated email address. AI then scans the information, pulls out the important details, and enters them into an expense report. Employees give the document a final review before submitting, but otherwise the process for them is completely hands-off, seamlessly turning receipts into reports.
That feature alone would be enough to get most employees onboard, but it’s just the beginning of what Sage Intacct’s employee expense automation can accomplish:
- Streamline Report Submission: Machine learning gets better at categorizing expenses and pre-populating expense reports over time, improving the speed, success and simplicity of the process with each report that gets created. Built-in policy checks verify compliance to accelerate approvals and reimbursements. Plus, reports can be submitted and approved from anywhere on any device.
- Elevate the Approval Process: AI helps orchestrate a multi-stage process that automatically routes expenses for approval at the line-item or payment level to the correct stakeholder: manager, department lead, finance team, etc.
- Expedite Reimbursements: After approval, expenses are quickly and consistently reimbursed through an AI-driven process, which helps to improve cash flow by getting money back to employees faster. It also eliminates an ongoing administrative burden for the finance team.
- Enrich Accounting Data: Expenses can be automatically linked to specific projects to enable up-to-date profitability tracking and an accurate understanding of project margins. Likewise, billing and revenue recognition improve once expense data flows seamlessly into project accounting, with AI correctly flagging billable vs non-billable expenses along the way.
Everyone benefits from features like these. Employees can easily manage receipts and prepare expense reports with AI doing the heavy lifting. Managers can move approvals and reimbursements forward faster without compromising oversight by relying on automation to navigate the complexity. Accountants and finance teams get accurate expense data automatically integrated with everything else and updated continually. Most importantly, employee expense automation from Sage Intacct helps companies achieve the accuracy, oversight, and agility they need in today’s economic environment.
Just like the other tools we’ve highlighted in this blog series, this one illustrates how Sage Intacct is doing more than just introducing AI—they’re finding smart solutions to long-standing problems and changing expectations around running a business.
Getting Started With Employee Expense Automation
Any company that tracks employee expenses could benefit from this feature, and any Sage Intacct user with a subscription to Time and Expenses can start using it right now.
It’s a simple process to set up in Sage Intacct, and just as easy to roll out to users since the tools are so intuitive and independent. RSM is here to help you get everything running optimally, just as we can help companies leverage all the AI-driven tools being added to Sage Intacct. And for anyone who doesn’t currently have Sage Intacct but wants to upgrade to a cloud-based financial management platform that solves employee expense tracking and so much more, RSM is here to help from the earliest stages of the implementation onward.
Ready to transform accounting and finance with AI? Sage Intacct is the solution, and RSM is your partner. Contact us.
Michelle DeMotte
Michelle is an Associate in the Technology Consulting Practice and works on the Sage Intacct team. She specializes in the not-for-profit and construction/real estate industries. As a Sage Intacct Certified Implementation Consultant, Michelle helps clients not only streamline their financial processes but also work more efficiently and ensures client satisfaction throughout the project life cycle.
