Case Study: Helping Expense Management Clients to Automate Administration Workload
ABOUT THE CLIENT:
The Challenge
While some businesses invest in big teams to take care of business management, others rely heavily upon third-party solutions to complete tedious labor, since the management of a large enterprise demands to check off multiple action items every single day.
When it comes to expense management companies, often expense approvers need to manually review hundreds of reports each day. Not only is this time-consuming and inefficient, but it costs valuable company resources as human errors can have expensive consequences.
This is why our client, a company that runs a large-scale expense management platform, took a deep interest in figuring a way to eliminate these pesky and laborious tasks for their customers.
This client has worked with Softjourn on a number of past projects to develop a plethora of useful features for their platform. However, this time, they wanted to offer their clients a chance to save time and money through optimization.
The client sought Softjourn’s help on this project because of our domain expertise and hands-on knowledge in fintech and AI & ML. Additionally, they’ve appreciated the open communication and dedication we’ve shown on past projects we’ve collaborated with them on.
Our client understood the pain points of their users, so we worked to respond to these concerns with the best possible solution. Besides automation, they also wanted to:
- Develop new features for their platform
- Integrate new services
- Build a direct pay option
We recommended this client utilize Autobots for optimizing processes for their users.
Autobots are one of the best ways to remove repetitive manual tasks from expense reporting, as they can automatically route, approve, return, and assign reports. This would be a solution that would automate manual processes without shifting control from internal teams.
The Solution
Autobots
A Time Validation Autobot would work alongside the users’ internal systems and make decisions based on internal policy guidelines. An Autobot would connect our client’s platform to a tracking system via AOI and check all of the information submitted, decreasing the chance of human error.
The Autobot can also be customized to replace actions like checking budgets, validating and verifying reports, and endless other possibilities.
Using Autobots brings the following benefits to the expense management process:
- Lower long-term costs
- Time saved
- Increased data accuracy
- Improved expense management cycles
- Simplified implementation
Our teams performed a number of integrations to both simplify and improve the way our client’s expense management tool works with other systems they are using. Softjourn’s team developed an Autobot with the capabilities to:
- Check for pre-approvals
- Help with encumbrance
- Budget checks for expense reports
- Liquidation for expense reports
- Final liquidation
Each Autobot is different as they are custom-made for our clients and the users of their services. The script for each is also customer-specific, and our team worked to create the best possible scripts according to the needs of our client’s users.
Integrations
Another essential part of this project was to integrate operational and master data with the client’s and their users’ systems. For this, we used Python, MySQL, AWS, and alternative technologies, like Talend and Boomi.
For the integrations to go smoothly, our team focused on inbound integrations, including personal, entities, and vendors, and outbound integrations, such as expense reports, journal entries, and invoice exports.
Direct Pay Feature
Our team was also involved in developing a distinct feature that would automate the payment of expense report reimbursements to employees or corporate card providers. Softjourn’s team created more than 30 customer-specific scripts to integrate electronic payments with our client's system.
After the onboarding process, users could fill in the necessary fields, and Softjourn’s team would map the process and make sure that the users of our client’s expense management platform had access to Direct Pay services. Our team developed an efficient onboarding process that enables the client to onboard a new user in just a few days.
The team continues to work on the client’s Direct Pay functionality to improve the internal processes with their in-house developers to prepare for the high demand for this feature from our client’s users. We also will continue to onboard new users of our client.
The Benefits
The new services we developed help our clients stay at the top of the expense management industry. The client gained the following benefits from our work together:
- The Autobots we built let the clients offer a new level of convenience to their users by automating laborious manual tasks.
- The new integrations ensure that our client can constantly update their offerings by integrating new services all on one all-encompassing platform. This gives their business a competitive edge and allows for future growth.
- Their new Direct Pay feature provides more flexibility when using various payment processors, and offers our client’s users more financial freedom and versatility in using the expense management platform.
Conclusion
The greatest advantage of removing repetitive tasks is the value of time that is freed up for expense management teams. This way they can focus on business aspects and growth, rather than performing everyday management tasks. Although there is an initial expense to automation, it quickly pays off in the consistent quality of work and extra work time.
Our client came with a complex, multi-part project for our team since they knew that there were many advanced solutions they wanted to offer their users to stay ahead of the competition. No matter the size of the project or how complicated it is, Softjourn’s team of talented developers is able to create brilliant, data-backed solutions.
Our client was impressed with how much faster, efficient, and accessible their platform is for users. We are confident that their users are also pleased with all of the new functionalities and automation as well.
If you are a fintech company looking for innovative tech solutions, please contact Softjourn to see how we can transform those ideas into incredible features that attract and keep customers.