Better Together: Why Humans and Technology are the Best Pair for Auditing Your Expenses
While your internal audit team can likely catch some red flags, it helps to also contract with an independent, objective audit service to fill in the gaps. Human auditors can:
Understand the Context Humans have a better understanding of your organisation’s regulatory requirements, as well as the unique attributes of your industry. Similarly, more can be gleaned from investigating reasons behind spending patterns or red flags to determine how they can be avoided in the future. Only human auditors can investigate at this level and effectively explain the findings to stakeholders.
Override over‑zealous machines when the machine miscategorises champagne vinaigrette and flags it as an alcohol expense, human auditors can override the flag and ensure technology will categorise it correctly moving forward. With more data being audited and more exceptions flagged as a result, human auditors often discover the exceptions aren’t problems after all.
Bridge the gap while machines improve with auditing technology, it’s easier to audit a larger amount of expense reports, instead of just a random sample. So instead of looking at 40 transactions and finding just two or three exceptions, an AI system might examine 4 million transactions and find 10,000 exceptions, according to the Financial Times. Human auditors can help machines sift through these exceptions, observing patterns in what to approve or reject over time. This enables human auditors to better train auditing technology when moving forward.
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