Expense Management with Teams & AI Builder

Expense management can be cumbersome and most expense management tools are clunky. Guess what, that time the employee is spending time is loss of productivity. It must be streamlines.

You might be also wondering how Teams a chat application can be used to manage expenses and potential replace popular expense management systems like SAP Concur, for small and mid-sized companies.

Well, you are asking the right question. MS Teams is being developed as a collaboration hub for the enterprise, and chat is a signification feature. However, Teams is much more than that and provides a full application development platform. While Teams is not the answer for everything, there are certain very use cases to use for simple common use cases like receipt capture and on the road expense management.

Expense Management With Teams

An employee, say salesperson who travels a lot, when had a lunch simply snaps the picture of the receipt and send it to someone (a bot, by Power Automate/Virtual Agent) in the company called say “expenses” using teams. The bot already knows who you are, so it simply reads and understands that this is a receipt and responds back with the information on the receipt and asks for confirmation to record it as an expense. User will have the option to correct the amounts and other information on the rich adaptive card and confirm. It saves the information to the file.

At the end of the month, the bot will see send a message on teams that you have expenses on the file and want provides the list to confirm submission. If any of the expenses are missing, user can add more. Once all set, those expenses will be sent to AP/Accounting for processing. You can even have the process automated to take approval and submit to the GL.

References

Here are few articles explaining different parts of expense management using Power Apps and Teams

1. Automate chatbot actions with flows in Microsoft Teams – Power Virtual Agents | Microsoft Docs
2. Use the receipt processing prebuilt model in Power Automate – AI Builder | Microsoft Docs
3. Expense Reporting Sample Power App with Receipt Sc… – Power Platform Community (microsoft.com)
4. Track expenses by scanning receipts added to your OneDrive for Business | Microsoft Power Automate

Using these concepts, you can put together a sophisticated expense management system for you organization that’s easier and more efficient that most expense systems in the market, for several use cases.

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