Filing expenses exist for pretty much everyone. At Microsoft, employees are now empowered by a no and low touch reimbursement process that uses automation and machine learning to perform micro-actions on behalf of the users. With OneExpense, Microsoft’s new automated expense reporting architecture, the company has transformed the entire expense process while sunsetting its previous solution.
I like to think about how to make expenses less expensive. We were seeing employees spending 15-20 minutes for a simple expense. Can we automate it or give them a better experience?
—Amruta Anawalikar, senior program manager, Microsoft Commerce Financial Services
“I like to think about how to make expenses less expensive,” says Amruta Anawalikar, a senior program manager for Microsoft Commerce Financial Services (CFS), the team responsible for expenses in Finance Engineering. “We were seeing employees spending 15-20 minutes for a simple expense. Can we automate it or give them a better experience?”
Whether it be travel for business, a working lunch, or supplies for a home office, employees everywhere are familiar with the process of saving the receipt, filling out an expense sheet, and then filing for reimbursement. Depending on how many items a user must sort through, this small-but-necessary piece of housekeeping can take up significant time.
In rolling out the new OneExpense architecture, Microsoft gains access to automation and flexibility to implement future capabilities in a cloud-based environment that’s supported by Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure.
[Check out how automating expense reporting at Microsoft boosts the company’s employee experience. Learn how Microsoft is transforming its corporate expense tools with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics 365. Discover how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning. Learn how Microsoft migrated critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure.]
Making it easier to do more
“When we think about Microsoft’s mission to empower end users to achieve more, that applies to internal customers as well,” says Ashley Park, a program manager with Microsoft Financial Operations.
MyExpense, the new expense app that runs on the OneExpense architecture, was developed with that principle in mind. Previously, Microsoft employees relied on a legacy on-premises system to manage expenses. This limited what users could do with the environment and meant that filing was a manual process.
Built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations and leveraging Microsoft Azure services, MyExpense is a modern cloud platform with the ability to introduce automated expense reporting through OneExpense.
When an employee swipes a corporate card, OneExpense will identify which expense category it falls under—travel, home office, or meals, for example—then proactively sends an email a week later asking the employee to confirm.
From there, users can make micro-changes without having to go into the tool. If there are no changes, the user can submit the expense report, which is automatically delivered to the appropriate destination for approval.
It’s a better experience for everyone, which should see users spending less time on manual documentation.
“We want to go from 600,000 hours per year spent on expenses to 300,000,” Park says.
And CFS has an idea as to how they’ll reach that goal.
The things you can do with a modern system
OneExpense does more than automated expense reporting.
“There are local, national, and international policies to take into account,” Anawalikar says. “We have to think about automation differently. Dynamics 365 on Azure is such a rich infrastructure; we can make changes to the system that are separate from automation, which makes automation that much easier.”
A byproduct of the automation is that we can decrease the number of manual touches using AI. This supports compliance by design and reduces the number of audited expense reports downstream.
—Ashley Park, program manager, Microsoft Financial Operations
By layering automation within MyExpense, Microsoft can process functions separately. Microsoft Dynamics 365 empowers agility, giving the team enough flexibility to make changes without affecting scale. Differences across regions, including tax implications and other reporting requirements that differ around the globe, can be quickly addressed, enabling the team to transition from the legacy platform to MyExpense for over 180,000 users across 112 countries in approximately 12 months.
It also means the automation can be used differently, leveraging OneExpense and Microsoft Azure services to support several efforts and teams across the expense lifecycle.
“A byproduct of the automation is that we can decrease the number of manual touches using AI,” Park says. “This supports compliance by design and reduces the number of audited expense reports downstream.”
Approvers can now see if something has been flagged.
When a manager gets an expense report, they’ll see a risk score applied. Using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and artificial intelligence, OneExpense can look at an employee’s spending history and attributes of the report and identify if it is a low, medium, or high-risk submission.
Eventually, OneExpense will be able to use AI to understand why a report has a high score, pointing the manager directly to the risk factor.
This feature helps elsewhere as well.
“Downstream, the audit will have fewer reports added to the post-mortem,” Anawalikar says. “The same risk score is part of our audit system. A threshold will show us whether an expense report should be audited.”
Readying Microsoft for MyExpense
To help migrate 180,000 Microsoft employees around the world to the new system, Kris Jolma, a group finance program manager in Finance Operations, focused on the benefits of transitioning to the new MyExpense solution.
“It’s not just ‘Here’s a new tool, have fun,’” Jolma says. “There are 80,000 Microsoft employees in the United States, there’s a lot of change management as we launch.”
Acceptance of automated expense reporting will take some time, as users are familiar with the traditional process of manually filling out and submitting sheets. But as employees recapture time and re-allocate it to something meaningful, the value of MyExpense becomes clear.
This message is helping Microsoft ready users for a new experience.
While configurations for specific expense categories across different regions will take some time to set up, the result is still improved productivity. This has helped improve adoption, as was recently rolled out in 66 of the 112 countries and regions where Microsoft has offices.
Saying ‘Hello’ to a better experience
As MyExpense has become the go-to solution for Microsoft’s expense reporting, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) has now retired the old on-premises servers that ran the legacy solution. This has created savings in support, maintenance, and operational costs, and also reduced the amount of time users spend on expenses.
“Users weren’t satisfied with the previous expense tool, it took too much time away from them,” Anawalikar says. “We cannot provide an automated experience unless they’re migrating to MyExpense.”
With more and more reports being submitted via automation instead of manual submission, Microsoft will soon reach a tipping point where time saved doing expenses is a measurable outcome. MDEE is closely engaged with new MyExpense users to further refine the process.
We have scalable automation capabilities for expenses now. We can showcase this to our users and external customers.
—Kris Jolma, group finance program manager, Finance Operations
“We’re working on features where users can customize their experience,” Park says. “Right now, the automated expenses are sent out to everyone a weekly basis, but we’re adding ways to let users decide their own cadence.”
New automation and functionality added to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations will continue to grow the OneExpense environment, transforming more tasks, making life easier, and strengthening compliance. This will be a big deal at Microsoft and the rest of the world.
“We have scalable automation capabilities for expenses now,” Jolma says. “We can showcase this to our users and external customers.”
- Traditional processes, like filing expenses, give users peace of mind, but demonstrating the value of automation creates an opportunity to introduce more improvements.
- Always look for ways to simplify. In evaluating Microsoft’s environment, the Program team reduced the number of categories from 400 to 120.
- MyExpense is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations and a few Microsoft Azure services, which has given the organization access to core functionality without any custom work.
- Digital transformation helps to streamline, but it doesn’t mean creating a one-size-fits-all approach. Use a layered approach to create macro and micro levels of customization.
- Check out how automating expense reporting at Microsoft boosts the company’s employee experience.
- Learn how Microsoft is transforming its corporate expense tools with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
- Discover how Microsoft is creating efficiencies in finance with Dynamics 365 and machine learning.
- Learn how Microsoft migrated critical financial systems to Microsoft Azure.
