Name: Copy of 5 Smart Ways to Strengthen Compliance (Without Making Everyone Hate Finance)
Uploaded: 2026-02-25T21:06:09.688Z
Duration: 46 min 36 s
Description: Copy of 5 Smart Ways to Strengthen Compliance (Without Making Everyone Hate Finance)

Transcript for "Copy of 5 Smart Ways to Strengthen Compliance (Without Making Everyone Hate Finance)": Alright. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our webinar, five smart ways to strengthen compliance without making everyone hate you. My name is Taylor Dekorte. I'm on the North American events team here at Emburse and your host for today's event. Today, we'll exploring how we'll explore how leading finance teams are transforming compliance from a burden into strategic advantage, tightening spend controls, reducing fraud risk, and enforcing policy without slowing down their people. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. This webinar is being recorded. You'll receive a copy of the recording 24 after the event ends. On the right hand side, you'll find the documents tab with some curated resources we recommend you check out. And at Emburse, we do encourage that you ask questions throughout our webinar. You can use the q and a tab at any time. Chat is also available today, so feel free to engage with us and your fellow webinar attendees. And with that, I'll go ahead and invite Brett Chenail to join me on stage here. Brett Chenail is our lovely speaker for today. Brett is a product and technology leader who leads the presales organization. He brings a strong background as a solutions consultant and custom in solutions consulting and customer engagement. And he partners closely with our customers to solve complex business and technical challenges, translating into real world needs or translating real world needs into scalable, high impact solutions while leading cross functional teams. Alright. Perfect. All right. Well, Brett, you you. wanna take it away? Yeah. Thank you, Taylor. I appreciate it. Appreciate the introduction. What a fun topic this one and aptly named, how to strengthen your compliance Really Without Having Everybody Hate You. I think that's usually directed at the finance department that understands the policy and the compliance that they want to put in place to be able to save money. So a really, really great topic for today. Let's jump into really the three areas that we're going to go into. So first is how do you create and enforce a policy? And so these do go hand in hand, we'll look at a little bit of the apprehension, I think, that most organizations have with enforcing a policy. They can probably understand policy. Being able to create it might be difficult and enforcing it has historically been a very slippery slope, a little tricky one to do to be able to get what you expect out of savings and, again, as the title says, not make sure everybody hates you in the process of doing so. Then we're gonna run through five different ASOs. So we have five really tips to strengthen compliance. So what can you do, especially in this modern day of looking at how software can enable us to go ahead and enforce that policy that you want to have, to be able to get the savings that you want to save. How can we do that? There's five major areas that we're going to walk through. And then there is really this last part of of where to get started. And and I'll even approach this from two different ways. It's not so much of always where to get started. Some people are at that stage. They they don't have much in the way of policy. They would like to, but they just don't know where to start. Then there's also a lot of companies that have old policy. Right? So they have maybe something that has been on the shelf, did it had an effort maybe five years ago, four years ago, even three or two years ago is something that might be out of date for you. And so We'll look at how to get started or how to reenergize or revamp that policy that you may have and how to get that implemented quickly. We'll start with this great cartoon. Like this person, represents many of us. I will put myself in this bucket. I have traveled for over eighteen years. I have put in more and submitted more expenses, than I would like like to recognize. Really, there is historically this And even today, a lot of companies are really dealing with the pressure that finance has to save money, right? To find, to do more with less, right? You can phrase it in lot different areas, but it's really good to watch the spending protect the company in a fiscal manner without making the lives of our staff really miserable. A lot of the times you'll see this balance of, Boy, I have all this policy that I would love to enforce, but I really wanna make sure that my staff stays productive, okay? And a lot of the time, that burden goes on the staff to adhere to policy, and it really has not been a fun experience. Right? And so we're going to really look at how can we have You're gonna hear me say this phrase, how can we have our cake and eat it too? How can we get the results that we need from our finance department, but also actually enhance the experience of our traveler or whoever is having creating those spend, maybe from invoices or things like that. So compliance. What actually is compliance? Right? So compliance, when we look at, it is policy plus enforcement of of that policies. Right? So policy given, you know, being the I have a set of rules or regulations and things that I I would like everyone to adhere to. The enforcement, just like what the word obviously means, how are we going to get everybody to, adhere to that policy? And when you have both, then you have compliance. Everybody is there. So let's look at this cyclical way of creating compliance. I'm gonna start in the middle with analysis. A bit of my personality, I like to understand a situation very well before you start making decisions about things. And so a lot of our finance departments, what we wanna do, and I'm still gonna steal my thunder a little bit, but you wanna understand the scenario, the situation that you're in. You wanna really, to break it down to simple terms, what's working, what's not working. Right? So how do you create policy on things that you know can save, the company money, time, right, risk? And also what is working, validate that what we have in place is something that is fine, we don't need to address, we don't need to put into it. So analysis is really the first stage of that. And then we wanna go ahead and look at the policy. Creating a policy from scratch or revamping one or adding to it, obviously, I'm more of the opinion that it's something that should be revisited on a yearly basis or constantly being watched. It doesn't even have to be a yearly basis given that we can see things in real time these days. But you wanna be able to go ahead and create those policies. Where are the areas that given a certain situation, we can save money? Whether that's money through productivity of our staff, keep them focused and productive on what the responsibilities are. Where do we see expense leakage? Where are we actually spending more money than we need to? Right? And and where, quite honestly, do you see some negligence or fraudulent activity? It does happen. Right? Now it's great when you come up with that policy. How do you enforce it? And this is, like I said, this is where this balancing act historically, I I think organizations struggle with is, boy, we would really love everybody to do this. But to get them to do that, to enforce this regulation, you might as well just have them quit their job and just do judge just that regulation. Right? It it's too painful. It's annoying. It's time consuming. And really, is where the rug comes into play here. How do we do our analysis? We create our policy. We enforce it again and then be able to do analysis, adjust that policy and enforce it. Right? So we wanna make sure that we can have this cycle going, constantly going. And if you can do that, organizations really do find a lot of savings in in financial without impacting, again, the experience of the, of the staff member. So let's let's dive a little bit deeper into this, into the five different ways that we can strengthen compliance. And, again, with help making, everybody hate finance. Right? We actually love finance. Right? They, they are the protectors of our organizations, and allow us to help us grow. So the five different areas. The first one, it's gonna be a technology play. And I think most people would would expect this. Right? And, specifically, you need to really understand how to leverage AI controls and AI tools. If you have not looked at software in a while, this is the time to do so. So we we do not have to rely on old software that, has maybe surface level AI or something like that. Right? And it was built at a different era of, of expense. You really need to dive in to see what where AI, has made such leaps, to be able to bring efficiencies and and automation to to this industry. Then the middle part, how do we automate, standardize on policy management? It is one of those things where how do we make sure we have a system that is very configurable that we can go ahead and take what we want in terms of a policy and be able to implement that? Then we start looking at things where we can control the spend and how we can control that spend. You're going to see a theme here where we wanna be able to control that spend way upfront, right, in the workflow, rather than, I would say, more of an older way, which would be at the end of the workflow, of an audit or, again, the burden on the finance department to be able to control that spend. Because it's really not you'll find it's not a good way. You're not gonna see the results by going that way. And we have tools where we can have some enforcement, again, more at the beginning of the workflow. How do we monitor and improve the quality control? So how can we constantly have this visibility, and where are those tools to be able to see things in real time to be able to even adjust in real time? Right? So there are tools to be able to do that. And then this last part, cultivate a culture of accountability. Goes out saying, I would say 99.9 of employees, they want of course, they want the company to save money. No one thinks that companies should be blowing money when when they they don't need to be, and they wanna be very cost conscious because they can put that back into the business. I think it takes the other four areas that I spoke upon to be able to get that culture correct. So let's jump into the first one. How do we leverage AI, powered tools? So so if you look at what is in market now, and really what Emburse offers, what we've been concentrating on, the last several years is is embedding our AI into our software. Again, not a bolt on, more surface level capability, something that is inherent really to the core of our, of our capabilities. And the first one is how do you and and the reason behind this is how do you get accuracy and integrity first. Right? So you have to be able to trust AI to be able to leverage it. Right? And so the first part we look at if you look at, let's say, in in a putting in an expense. Right? So being able to capture data off of an an invoice or a hotel folio, you're gonna you see that icon down there? A a receipt, taking a picture of receipt. How can we actually pull that data off of that receipt, understand what it is, and categorize it? AI is fantastic at being able to do this. AI now we've had I'll use an acronym, OCR, but it's optical character recognition. Right? So it's the ability to look at a picture and pull data off of it. We've been able to do that for years, okay, with a certain level of accuracy. AI has what has taken that concept of OCR, being able to understand data, and really provided much more accurate. So we are up around the 98% accuracy and growing in being able to understand data that is on a receipt of a folio and pulling that out and getting it into the system in the right categorization. So if you can do that, the amount of time savings is enormous. We're able to use our software. And so the the ability to take a receipt, just take the picture, and then your hands are done, and it's already in the system is much different than what you might see in I've been I've been like I said, I've been putting in receipts for a long time, about eighteen years. It was based off of manual data input, okay, where I would have to take my receipt, I could get the picture in, but I would have to type things in of what type it was. This was dinner. I had all these people here. People that have traveled, they have done this work quite a while. This can be automated, right? So this is what we have out in market, is be able to automate that ability to take that receipt, understand what is on there, understand the context of it, be able to get that into the system with extremely high level of accuracy. The reason why I'm spending so much time on this one icon is because you have to have this to have a lot of the downstream capabilities that you see. If you can't get your accuracy way up to where we have it, you really can't employ other tools because you can't trust the data. Right? So you need to be able to have confidence in the data that you have. And that really starts at the beginning of the work flow, getting that off of an invoice or any type of receipt and getting it in there. Now the second part that I'm gonna jump into, you see the CCS credit card transaction processing. Right? So now this is this is, this scenario, and it's very, very, very popular, it's a very good thing to do to control expense is when you have corporate cards, right, corporate credit cards. Now the reason behind that is that we have matching. Right? So we're able to have our staff use a corporate card, and we'll get into that topic a little bit deeper, whether it's a pre funded card, that's another way of controlling spend, or if it's just really we work with any card. Really what you want to be able to do is have that spend using the corporate card and being able to match that to a receipt. So you can go ahead and use your card. The card is That transaction we have captured. You've taken a picture of the receipt, automatically, again, has gotten that into the system, and we will automatically match that up. Right? So we have the receipt, we have the evidence of the spend, we have the spend on the credit card, and we can go ahead and match those things up. And it's really hands off processing. So that is another big way of being able to leverage AI power tools. And then this last time this last part is folio. So, auto and hotel, folio. This is something that AI has had a huge impact on. Again, if anybody has had to put in expenses on a trip, what's the last thing you do? It's the hotel. Why? Because there's so many line items that you always had to manually put in. It was the miserable part of putting in your expenses, is having you take that. Now, we have seen a couple years ago, probably how much is it? Probably like four, five, six, seven years ago, something like that, where we could do some extraction, off of a hotel folio, but it was based off of a template. That's where OCR, again, optical character recognition, the ability to be able to pull, recognize data in a picture, a PDF, something like that, and understand it, that's where it was. The data had to be configured in the exact same place every single time. Now hotels would change or or maybe car rental or something like that. They would change what the format was and boom, there, your your capability broke. And so so you really didn't have it, so it stayed a manual process. AI tools now, again, because of our ability to extract, understand that data, we are highly accurate in being able to pull it off. So I highlight the hotel and the car because those historically have been very, very costly in terms of time. And you see a lot of mistakes there too. Again, so it's not just the amount of time that the traveler might experience in this scenario, traveler. But again, a lot of times, it's just a simple mistake. Maybe a date's wrong, cost of you know, the line item's wrong, something is categorized, just the wrong drop down, pick box, you know, things like that. And it really has a huge effect downstream. So being able to leverage AI powered tools is enormous. Okay. Automate and standardize policy management. So configurable rules and rule base. Right? So this is where you need a system. So, again, if we look back to our picture of that slide that, was cyclical in in creating a policy and enforcing it, the enforcing part of this is how do we have, configurable rules, right, to be able to understand what we want to have in terms of our policy and be able to easily get that into the system. Right? So having a highly configurable system is, extremely important. Now some examples of of of those type of things. We would like to enforce different airfare class restrictions. Right? If it was up to me, the system would look at, Oh, it's Brett. He should always fly first class. Doesn't actually happen, but you could actually do things like that. So class restriction based on employee level or the destination or the trip or the number of stops. You might say, like, hey. We would rather have you fly direct rather than, you know, stopping three times. It's quite of a waste of your time. Right? So that is one. Being able to have a system that's highly configurable to be able to employ policies that you want in place, that is important. Global localization. So this is another for companies, and this is ever more popular as we go on, right? Most companies are very global, whether it is that they are their presence is global, they have travelers that are global, or they work with vendors, other vendors that are also global. And so when you do that, you have to have compliance based on that region. So having, being able to configure and having compliance and enforce those policies on a global scale is much more important. So you can look at things like supporting European tax laws, right, or invoicing mandates or or different types of receipt submission standards. Right? This is across the regions. Right? And so being able to have a system that understands all of those rules and regulations, keeps up with those rules and regulations, and then, again, we're employing all of those same compliance rules based using AI controls on top of that in a global sense is extremely, extremely important. Now, the last part here is the air shopping rules builder. Now, I'll admit, when I came to this industry, Emburse has this amazing capability. I don't understand why every single organization does not have this capability. It is Emburse, reshop. Now, you hear the term reshop, you must know what I'm talking about already, in that when you book a flight, say I book a flight a month in advance, what we'll do in the background is be able to monitor that flight. I'll And just give you an example. There's actually several examples that reshop has. So if that flight goes down in price, which this does happen, right, so most people don't have the visibility of the fluctuation of prices, and in this case, flight, but it could adhere to, you know, a hotel or other things. Right? They will rebook it for you. Right? So, again, this is this this cake and eat it too that I I'm referencing as how do we save money but we're not impacting the experience of the traveler. Right? So we can go ahead and book that same exact flight, same seat, everything, at a lower rate. Or we can do certain things like book the same flight but get you your aisle seat. Right? Or an upgrade or something like that. There's plenty of rule based things. But, again, we're doing this in the background. So automate automating is the keyword here that in the background, we have a system in place to be able to recognize where we can save money and enforce that isn't really the correct term here, but employ that capability is so important. Again, it is one of those things that I learned, and I was like, no way. That is not true. That can't happen. There's no way that you can shop for this in the background. But yes, that is actually what we do. I think almost I mean, organization should have this capability. Okay. Spending pre approvals. So really the premise here, and I'll lay this out and then we'll go into some scenarios. The premise here is before the dollar is spent, right, how do we have controls in place? Okay? And there's several different ways that we can do that. Because, again, if you have controls in place before the dollar is spent, now we're doing cost containment. Right? So we are reducing our risk of going over budget or, again, out of compliance spend, which is sometimes hard to get back. Right? So so how do we have prespend, authorization? So before anything is booked or something like that, we can go ahead and have an approval system, Again, configured, if you look at our our previous slide, configured based on rules. How do we you know, how can we have preapproval? You know? Like a you know, having a flight that I gotta I gotta go take off tomorrow and it's probably expensive or something like that. We wanna have, a manager be like, Yes, he really has to get out to California. Making sure that we have a way to pre authorize the spending before the dollar is spent is is enormous. And it's a great way to cost contain. Right? So the other part of this we can look at is cards. Right? So I I touched upon cards a little bit, but we can have a lot of policy tied to virtual cards. Now Emburse has their own cards. We have the Emburse card, which which is fantastic. We work with with every other card that you can wanna employ in here. But the the point of this, and there's several different ways to do it, is that you wanna be able to put cost containment around that. Now, my personal experience with this, and it's a great example, is if you use a prefunded card for specific reasons. And and again, prefunded card, I we would have go to a conference, something like that. And at the conference, lunch was provided, dinner was provided, breakfast was not provided, and we were there for a couple days. So everybody got a card, whether that would be virtual or you actually could use a plastic card, but you could use a virtual card. It had $50 on it. Okay? And so that $50 everybody had because that's how much we expected people to spend on breakfast. And so the point of that scenario is now I understand my spend upfront. Okay? I know what the spend is upfront. I've given everybody the ability to use that money for a specific purpose, right? But I've contained that cost. I know it's not going to bleed out. I know that we're not going to have any leakage of expense, where people are going outside of what we expect them to spend on breakfast. I love a good breakfast, and yeah, I'm one of those people that would probably blow more on breakfast than on dinner, because it's fantastic. Who doesn't want pancakes in the morning? So when you look at this scenario, how do we use cards to be able to contain that cost? Again, when you do that, we know we're not going to bleed out. We understand our budget. It's a great way, again, from the experience to be able to allow our employees in this case to be able to have breakfast when we're not bleeding out. But again, it's a great way to be able to do it and there's constraints that you can put around it. Time, obviously, the money, the other things like that to be able to do. So virtual cards, fantastic way of doing that. Right? And then budget, it kinda goes into the other one of budget enforcement. Right? So spend is only permitted within a certain budget or policy constraints. Right? And that's directly tied to the card control. So, you know, we same side of sale that I talked about. Give everybody $50 they can only spend the $50 that's it, right? And you can put, you know, that the $50 last for the week that you're there and then the car, you know, goes away, right? So you can understand the difference between doing that or just letting everybody spend whatever they want. An organization has predictable spend and that's what's really improved. So spending in pre approvals has a vast impact on our ability to to control costs. Monitor and improve quality control. So so there's a couple of different things that we wanna look at here. So if we get into the world of PO and invoice, this is almost like the, you know, parallel to using a corporate card, is being able to PO match with our with our invoice, right, to be able to validate that. And so that is something you want to be looking at as something that we provide as being able to match up our invoice with our purchase order. And so in doing this, really the key here I'm going to use again is automation, right? We don't want to be doing this in a manual sense of a stack of POs and a stack of invoices and go ahead and match them up, match them up. You want to be able to do this automated in the background so that we are not spending time doing this manual process over and over and over and over again. And then a mobile experience. I'll tell you why this is important. You wanna make sure that you have parity of your mobile experience and and your desktop. I do probably the majority of my expenses on my my mobile app. Alright? So having all of the, features and capabilities that you provide, in a in a browser, right, in a web application, but on your desktop, you wanna make sure that you're also providing those in the web application. Right? So any of the AI enabled, like audit and compliance, I'll dive into that. Again, if you only had it in one area and not in the area of a mobile, most people do things on their mobile or or or a percentage of it on the mobile, you know, especially when it comes to travelers, you wanna make sure that you have those capabilities in both places to be able to realize that savings. Right? If you only had it in one, you can only you know, there's a percentage that you're gonna get it from. You're not gonna get it from people that use the mobile, so that's important. Now this next one, AI enabled audit and compliance goes into this, so this capability that you want. Emburse just released this fantastic product called Assurance. And really what Assurance is, is a pre submission. So the prior to submitting your expense report or an invoice, like but we keep going with the with the example of expense reports. Prior to doing that, what can we put in place to be able to make sure that the person, the staff member, the user is adhering to all of the policy that we want? Again, this goes into that enforcement part of that category of that slide that I keep going, referencing back to, is how do we enforce that? Now, be clear, what does Assurance do? It's AI enabled audit and compliance. I'll give you a couple of examples. Most companies need an itemized receipt. You go to dinner, take a picture of the receipt, and it's not the itemized receipt. We're going to flag that. At the point of taking that picture, it will recognize this is not the itemized receipt. Therefore, we're going to shoot that message and notify that to the person that took the receipt, the end user, and say, hey. Hey. Hey. Wait a minute. Before you get up from from from a a great dinner that you had with colleagues, wrong receipt. Go back and take it. Right? So that's one example of what Assurance is doing. The idea here, and you heard it a little bit earlier, is looking at the entire workflow, right? The entire process of when the dollar is spent to the dollar is returned, right, back, we wanna put all of these safeguards upfront, not on our audit, not on our finance teams. If if it gets to the finance team, this is where wasting time, right, having expense leakage happens, right, if you have it down here. If we have it up front, right, we are catching all these things. The impact is around 85% savings. Okay? And assurance is a big part of this. Is leveraging AI embedded in our software to be able to catch, out of compliance, sometimes nefarious actions that we can prevent up front so that we do not have this burden onto our finance teams and prevent this back and forth. Or, again, that the the, you know, the the dollar spent was just a loss. So really, really enormous. And then the other part is more automated categorization. You talked to me I I talked to you about how important it is to be able to under you know, to understand the data that is on our expenses, our receipts, things like that. Get it categorized in. And so having making sure that you have a vast, a very all encompassing ability to categorize your spend is important. Right? So this goes into to how do we monitor, how do we improve, and how do we quality control. You need to be able to have that automation. You need to have it on your mobile, right, to be able to have that capability for people that are on your desktop or on your mobile. You need to employ AI backed embedded software. Is so much efficiency and capability that is brought now to this industry that if you are ignoring it, you are missing out. So you really need to have that. All right. So create a culture of accountability. Now, again, the other shift that is happening right now is that when you look at expense, it is now more in real time. We can see spend upfront. So we can see, especially if you're using Hertford cars, things like that, we can see that expense upfront. Finance teams can see that expense upfront. So having that visibility, again, I think I should just always go back to this slide that I'm referencing, but it had an analysis in the middle of it. Having visibility with dashboards and having the amount of data that you need to have for a finance team to be able to, again, understand what policy changes we should have in force and then use our software to be able to bring that capability out to our staff is important. So having personalized dashboards is important. Now, why does that? Because it creates a culture of accountability. If finance teams have this ability to be able to see it and enforce policy and we have great software to be able to automate that, not burden, right? Not burden, you are more apt to get compliance with your staff, right, because it's easy to do so, right? Making sure, again, that the customer, the end user experience is actually enhanced and not penalized just because you you you need to have, tighter restrictions in policy. The other part is real time coaching. Right? Again, if we have things in real time, we have visibility in real time, we can notify in real time, we can coach in real time. Right? And very simple. It becomes a part of the culture of being able to do it rather than having some once a year communication that comes out. And then, again, education enablement. These are all things that go, I think, almost into any change with an organization is that you really need to make sure that people understand. This also goes into when you do make policy changes, when you do have enforcement changes, how are they it's great to understand why they need to do that. What is the positive effect that the organization is going to realize? Was at an organization and a lot of they do this where you don't need a receipt under $75, then under $25, then under $5, things like that. And when you put these restrictions in place, which is easily done in configuring with the software, It's great to understand from an employee standpoint why is that? So always having a change management aspect or knowledge of this or approach to this really helps things enforce. Understanding always is always a great approach to do that. Okay. So taking action. Right? We went through quite a lot in five five different areas of being able to concentrate on so that you can get better compliance again without hating hating on our awesome finance department. Now, again, I started this with where do you start your journey? And, some might be starting this journey. Some might be dusting off work that was done years ago. Some, I would love that this is something that is either looked at, either on a consistent basis or some type of regularity rather than we did this whole mess of work, stick it on a shelf, let it run. You will see that policy, if not watched, erodes. And it erodes for a couple different reasons. Obviously, we have, changes in the company. We have changes in the marketplace. We have changes, you know, in the country that you are in, right? You have changes in software. Obviously, this is where inverse comes in, in terms of the amount of advancement that we have had, that if you're not looking at your policy and how to enforce and you don't have that visibility, really that you're really not safeguarding the company from undue or unneeded expense. So where do we start if you're in any one of these categories? Okay. So I think the first part is if you're in this stage, is review your compliance program. Everybody should have a program, right? Again, this scales. Largest of the large companies, small companies can have right sized compliance programs. The first part, again, is to review what you have in place. Like I said, if it has been on the shelf for a couple of years, this is something you really wanna dust off and almost start from scratch yourselves. Right? Make sure you have that analysis part, that you have visibility, that you understand where you can save with new policy and how you can enforce that policy. This is where Brett becomes a broken record, but how you can enforce that policy while also enhancing the user experience. Right? So to do that, you you really do need to embrace AI. How can you embrace AI? This could be a topic onto itself for hours on end. To me, I would understand the fundamentals of AI. Understand what it is. Understand your vendors and how you are using it. Right? And so if if you do that, then you can understand the power of AI and what it can bring to to your organization. Again, AI is not there to replace a human. It is to replace and automate work that is it is more less value to the company. So I was I was struggling to get that out. So you right? You wanna look at where AI can go ahead and automate these tasks, these repetitive tasks that are more maybe administrative in nature and look at, boy, if I can go ahead and take that away from my staff, they are not distracted from doing what we want. We want them to do what their responsibilities are and the value that they bring the organization. Right? And so I would really embrace AI. It has come a long way. It is rapidly moving as well. So the AI of today is much different than the AI of a year ago. And so making sure that you have a vendor that can keep up with AI, and and I would look at how inverse is you utilizing AI and how we are leveraging it. It all has to do with your architecture. Here here's the secret sauce if you really wanna know. You really need to understand the vendor's architecture of how we are how we're leveraging AI to be able to keep up with it and to constantly be bringing that value to our customer base. So if we're not keeping up with AI and comfort constantly leveraging, you know, as it grows, we grow, we're not bringing, right, that value that we can to our customer base. So really understanding AI, embracing AI, understand how it can value your organization is extremely important. Now the shift of compliance to upstream. Right? So, again, we just talked about it a little bit, but I wanna drive this home because this is where the the value comes into play. Right? If you can take compliance, right, policy and enforcement, if you can take that and looking at the workflow of, again, an expense from start to finish, from receipt capture, you know, to submitting, to providing those dollars back to, in our case that we keep talking about, our traveler. Bringing that compliance upfront in that workflow, that process has a massive effect, massive effect on our finance department. So we are seeing, you know, 50% less time even submitting. Right? We are seeing, like I said, 85% time saved on our finance department. Everybody has I guarantee you, everybody has been in the case where they submitted something and it came back and forth and back and forth. I mean, what happens is either, you know, there's time wasted back and forth, there is or there is expense leakage where we just don't even adhere to the policy and go, Well, whatever. We'll go ahead reimburse. Right? It might be just a mistake. Or you're not getting that spend back to you. So there might be a delay in getting reimbursed. But the profound effect that we have found, bringing all of that compliance early into the process has had one of the biggest effects that we have seen in terms of efficiency gains, time savings, visibility, right? It all kind of comes into it. And again, this is not at the burden of the traveler, right? This is actually benefiting the traveler as well because it is so much less work to be able to do all of these things and using AI to be able to take advantage of all the compliance adherence that we can. It's fantastic. Would Your next steps, that's my guidance to you. Review your compliance programs. Really look at technology. I am in the presales organization. We talk about it. My team talks about it all day long. We'd be more than happy to guide you through how Emburse has brought our capabilities to market and what we are doing with our customers and the savings that we have. We'd love to talk to anybody about this at any time. It is a fantastic topic. As you can tell, I can babble about it all day long. And then, again, ship that upstream. That's where your big savings is at. So at the end of the day, really, I want to high five this person right here with their hand up. Right? This is really what you want, is you want someone that is on the go traveling that can adhere to the policy that is really being put on them, and then it is not a burden to them. Right? That they don't have to think about, oh, geez, I have to put this and this and it's just stacking up, and now I have three months of expenses that I have to put in. Right? We want to make sure that, again, the cake and eat it too, that finance has the ability to understand where they can save money, how they can create new policy, and then how can we enforce that policy while, right, and you can see the smile on her face, while we're actually making our employees happier. It doesn't always happen, right, in the real world. There's usually a cost of these things. I'm telling you there's not. Right? We are providing both that cost savings on one end, and we're enhancing the experience of the end user. So there really isn't a trade off on on any of this. So that's what I leave you with today. I hope this was very valuable to you. I I highly encourage you, again, to look at your policies, look at these five different areas, to be able to is a lot of savings out there, right, again, without impacting your staff. Yeah. Taylor, I think do we have time for a couple questions or no? You're on mute. Thank you. We have a couple questions here, that I wanna bring up. So, Brett, first of all, our first question here is, what's the biggest compliance mistake that you see finance teams making today, and how can we fix it quickly? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would say the first mistake that they make is a do nothing. And the reason why I say that is they might have their policy sitting on a shelf and their compliance sitting on a shelf, and they're not spending the time doing it. They may not have the visibility. It's usually there's a reason for it. It's not being negligible about it. It is usually a reason that they have putting it on the back burner or they just don't have the visibility. So how to see a quick Do the analysis of where you can actually save money. You'll understand how you can then start that journey of creating new policy and again being able to enforce that, give us a call. Right? So I think the biggest compliance mistake that they make is doing nothing. And really, the end result of that, you're losing money. You're you're 100% losing money if you're doing nothing about it. Yeah. And there's actually, a couple questions here that are similar, so I'm just gonna combine them into one final. question for us, to wrap up today. And for those teams that feel overwhelmed by audit preparation, Yeah. what's one immediate step, that they can take to become more audit ready? I think if you wanna give us just one final takeaway, or action item for people after this webinar, what would that be? Yeah. Audit ready. I can't help but say this again. Shift everything up in the process. Shift everything that you possibly can up in the process. If you do that and you can stay in compliance well in advance of even submitting any expense, invoice, anything, The audit is a much easier process. It's usually just the confirmation. So look for ways we can help you do this to be able to bring you capability, to be able to shift all of that work up early into the process, you will be much happier. Awesome. Thank you, Brett. And thank you everybody who was able to attend today, and view our webinar. We appreciate your interest, and look forward to you joining us on future webinars. Thanks again, Brett. Excellent. Thank you. Appreciate it. Have a great day. Thanks.