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How to simplify travel and expense management

April 28, 2022

Today, computers have the capability of recognizing text in a high-quality manner. It’s a widespread use case where someone takes a paper document, such as a receipt, and moves it into a digital format to do travel and expense reports. For us at Novacura, it only makes sense to use AI and let the computer do that work for you. Therefore, we created an application in our Novacura Marketplace for that specific need.

What’s the problem with travel and expense reporting?

The fact is that it takes time to have information on paper and convert it to text. As you probably know, many organizations have people who only work with this type of administration. 

This manual work has obvious downsides such as:

  • Inefficiency
  • Cost money
  • Risk of poor data quality in the system (Human errors / ”Fat finger” data)

Of course, that’s not an optimal business process.

Solution - automatically process your receipt image with AI

Paul Phillips, Director of Product Management Labs at Novacura, described the technology behind Form recognition in our previous article. Today we want to introduce a solution based on the same technology, that is meant to improve your business process – our Travel and Expense application.  

Instead of taking a receipt and manually typing in the information you already have on paper, you take a photo and add the information to your system in just a few clicks. The artificial intelligence (AI) only uses the fields relevant to this report, such as Receipt Type, Transaction Date, Total, Subtotal, Tax, Tip, etc.

 

 

Benefits of having an application with form recognition for travel and expense

  • Optimized time – instead of typing it all in, you snap a photo and check if everything looks the same, and you only act if there is a deviation. 
  • Fewer errors – this tool is even more accurate than manual retyping. Especially because sometimes there are errors in entered data done just by human mistake. 
  • Faster information flow – there is no need to wait for manual processing. For those doing invoicing, including billable expenses, this means increased cash flow for your organization.  
  • Increased employee satisfaction – This might be one of the most significant benefits. Removing a time-consuming and often frustrating task for employees will make their daily work easier and more efficient.  

What about my digital receipts?

When using Novacura Flow, and our Travel and Expense app, you’re not limited to just snapping a photo of the receipt. Since you often get digital receipts nowadays, you can, e.g., send a hotel receipt in the form of a PDF directly to a specific email where Novacura Flow picks up the email and reads it behind the scenes.

 

A user can send an email to a general inbox (eg. Expenses@mydomain.com) and, from that inbox, run it through Artificial Intelligence to read and parse the information on the pdf. 

Our benefit is that we have a more extensive landscape of applications that we offer. It’s not the value of one specific application but how you can improve your business process with the whole package, especially with our connectors such as the OData Connector. Our solution goes way beyond just travel and expense.
Paul Phillips
Novacura, Director of Product Managment

Novacura Flow will then send a push notification to the user to review the expense that was submitted to the email inbox.

Information about the Travel and Expense application

Our Travel and Expense application makes it easy to track expenses, mileage, and deductions during your travels. Every expense is sent immediately to IFS Applications as an Expense Sheet for further processing and reimbursement.  

We can configure all application to your business process. Low-code application development supports significantly increasing your organization’s adoption of new technologies to stay competitive in today’s market. At times, waiting for your ERP vendor to provide this as an OEM solution puts you behind the competition.
Paul Phillips
Novacura, Director of Product Managment

The application uses artificial intelligence (AI) to extract relevant information from your receipts and expedite the expense reporting process, making it easy to do your reporting as you are traveling — no need for additional paperwork when you return from your trip.  

It supports creating, reviewing, and updating expenses by Expense Sheet or Expense Details. Confirm Expense Sheets while traveling and quickly capture media into one easy to consume document connected to the Expense Sheet for Supervisory approval. 

Novacura Travel and Expense application allow supervisors to review expense sheets and associated document attachments to approve or reject, directly from their mobile devices.

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Table of contents
What’s the problem with travel and expense reporting? Solution - automatically process your receipt image with AI Benefits of having an application with form recognition for travel and expense: What about my digital receipts? Information about the Travel and Expense application

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