Comment by OkayPhysicist
21 hours ago
On the spend management side of things, I've found pretty remarkable success in letting LLMs check "does this receipt match this reimbursement request and based on all the information about the user, the request, and our policy, is it appropriately allocated to appropriate GL, Location, Department, and Project codes?" If the verification step fails, it kicks it back and the user can either override it (which gets it flagged for AP review), or fix it. It does substantially better than the naive Bayes classifier I was using before.
I’m not saying your implementation is bad or anything but my visceral reaction to this was “I’m glad I’m not on the other side of that”
Why? It sounds exactly like the design I would hope for. It automates what I'm going to do already without needing to wait. And it allows you to bypass it entirely and just revert to the manual process (along with waiting).
That all sounds reasonable until you realize that the same logic is how we ended up with customer support systems that try to walk you through a phone tree and if you are lucky, you will be able to press 0 to speak to a human without answering a bunch of questions first and being referred to the online help articles.
Do you enjoy using any of those systems? Do you want the world to be that way?
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In many businesses, the employee is responsible for inputting most of that. If a LLM can get to 95% accuracy and flag exceptions, the employees (and AP team) would actually have less work and bureaucracy.
Though we’ve had a few incidents where employees have submitted AI-generated receipts for reimbursement which is another issue..
It's already pretty common for some sort of tool involving some sort of AI to collect receipt data and attempt to categorise them and hook up to your accounts. They also make mistakes, though the advantage of more tractable, less configurable and more limited models is they're unlikely to interpret a prompt as "invent receipts that have never been submitted" or "delete records", as well as trained much more on receipt OCR and less on poetry....
As a business, you've also got to remember that employees are much more likely to complain if the 'agent' or any other form of automation errs by denying their claim or underpaying than the reverse. Depending on the scale of expenses and how likely you are to be audited, the cost of the odd mistake might be more or less than the cost of doing it manually.
Please tell me those are former employees. How can anyone feel confident committing such blatant fraud.
What is your point? This is pretty normal expense management in any company setting. I don’t know what is so bad about being on the other side of that. Hope I am not too inflammatory by asking what is the point but genuinely you pointed it out like it’s some archaic process flow but it’s part of almost every expense system.
I guess my current company’s processes may be easier to deal with than others. That or my position affords me some extra catering to.
The system is currently using a simple app to submit expenses and any issues gets a simple human chat request and a call if requested.
They try to avoid kicking anything back and if they do they make sure it’s reviewed first to make sure that it’s needed and to make sure the reason is understood.
Our company is also very large so I’m not sure how they manage but they do. People rave about the process instead of hating it.
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