Acumatica Debuts Automated Spend Management Tools

Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) company Acumatica has rolled out its Acumatica Advanced Expense Management and Electronic Bank Feeds for its Acumatica Cloud ERP solution, which will increase automation and electronic banking, according to a press release.

There will be new electronic banking feeds for corporate cards and automated receipt generation to help streamline back-office accounting processes.

Other highlights for the Expense Management feature will include mobile notifications for unreported card activities, proof of expense receipts captured with intelligent machine learning (ML)-enabled image recognition and expense categorization, advanced automated approval processes, streamlined reimbursements and automated reconciliations for corporate cards, the release stated.

For the Electronic Banking feature, Acumatica will offer secure connections with more than 11,000 financial institutions with multiple authentication methods and tokenization technology, according to the release. There will be real-time activity downloads available with automated smart-matching to existing transactions, and intelligent creation of expenses and disbursements. And anomaly detection and streamlined bank reconciliation will be available.

Ali Jani, chief product officer with Acumatica, touted the ML capabilities as particularly enticing for users.

“One of the most exciting features within Acumatica Advanced Expense Management is its ability to detect corporate card use activities and remind the user to capture images of physical receipts for auditing and compliance purposes,” she said, according to the release. “Combined with its Intelligent Machine Learning-enabled receipt recognition, expenses are intelligently categorized to streamline the approval and back-office reconciliation processes.”

Expense management has been an issue for American businesses, particularly as the pandemic crunched their finances this year. Many companies only pay for purchases after the fact, giving them very little insight into on how much is being spent — or none at all. Digital spend management tools could offset some of the damage.