Emburse Adds AI-Powered Receipt Scanning to Expense Management Solutions

Emburse has added an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered receipt scanning engine to its range of travel and expense management solutions.

The new Emburse Transcription Engine is a step toward fully automating expense management, allowing expenses to be submitted, approved and reimbursed without any human intervention, the company said in a Tuesday (Sept. 12) press release.

The AI-powered receipt scanning engine enables the import of detailed and error-free transaction information, eliminating the need for manual data entry or verification, according to the press release. By leveraging AI and optical character recognition (OCR) technology, the Emburse Transcription Engine can identify, extract and validate merchant and transaction information from both printed and electronic receipts, down to a line-item level.

With the combination of automated data extraction and Emburse’s business rules engine, expenses can adhere to an organization’s policy without the need for human review, except in cases where further explanation is required, the release said.

This automation allows for automatic processing of reimbursements or credit card reconciliations, per the release. The engine can even extract granular, line-item data such as fully categorized hotel folios or restaurant bills, enabling expense verification against negotiated rates and compliance with spending limits.

Emburse’s AI training is based on a spend dataset that leverages millions of transaction data points from over $85 billion in corporate and employee spending annually, according to the press release. Through extensive testing, the Emburse Transcription Engine has demonstrated up to 90% accuracy in correctly identifying important fields and populating them into a digital form. With ongoing data training, Emburse is continuously improving the system’s accuracy.

Richard Crum, chief product officer at Emburse, said in the release: “Expense reports are viewed by many people as one of the most painful parts of traveling for business, and that’s something we’re changing. Automating the process to the point that it seems to just go away is core to our goal of simplifying expense management.”

The ability to track and manage expenses effectively is more important than ever in navigating the realities of today’s business landscape. To address these challenges, business must tap innovative technologies, Adriana Carpenter, chief financial officer at Emburse, told PYMNTS in an interview posted Aug. 2.

“You have to leverage technology,” Carpenter said. “That’s why technology exists today, and it’s not just SaaS [Software-as-a-Service] technology. There are so many different types of technology that you want to leverage in order to streamline financial processes and gain real-time visibility into employee spend.”

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