Submitting expenses is one of those necessary tasks that no one looks forward to. Collecting receipts, retyping vendor names, switching between screens, and trying to get everything submitted before month-end pulls time away from billable work and often leads to small but costly mistakes. It’s extra work for your Delivery team, and often a pain for Finance, who has to deal with tracking down missing details and processing a surge of submissions at the end of the month.
AVA’s new Expense Agent is designed to get rid of that friction.
A More Practical Way to Manage Expenses
BigTime’s Expense Agent is built directly into AVA, our existing AI assistant. There’s no need to adopt a separate tool or adjust how approvals work. All you need to do is work with the AI tool already in your system.
Submitting an Expense
Here’s how it works: a user snaps a photo of up to five receipts and uploads them to AVA. AVA extracts the relevant details, completes required fields, and prepares the expense for review. No picture? No problem. You can just as easily as AVA to create a new expense with a simple text prompt, such as “Add a $20.58 Lyft expense to the BrightPath office for the client visit.”
Before the expense is officially submitted, the user reviews the information, making adjustments or confirming that everything looks right. While human approval is required, there’s no need for manually typing details into a new system or spreadsheet.
Querying Expenses
AVA is also conversational, meaning users can do more than simply submit an expense. Your team can also ask AVA to update existing expenses, submit a report, or look up information from expenses that have already been approved. They can send in ad hoc requests, like “Show me my unsubmitted expenses for my current project,” and get direct answers without needing to involve other teams.
Instead of navigating through multiple screens, users can handle common expense tasks directly and with fewer steps along the way.
Built for Busy Services Firms
Expense volume adds up quickly for service firms, especially for firms with client travel, reimbursable costs, and distributed teams. In many organizations, late or incomplete submissions happen simply because the process is cumbersome. Team members put off submitting expenses, and before you know it, Finance is struggling to reconcile another confusing month.
Expensing through AVA changes all that. Submitting and approving expenses is easy, so your team members are more likely to do it right away. As a result, Finance leaders have clearer visibility into expenses throughout the month (not only in the last few days).
This does not require changing approval structures or introducing a parallel system. Expense Agent works within the controls and workflows firms already have in place.
Reducing Administrative Overhead
BigTime’s Expense Agent reduces the time professionals spend on unbillable administrative work. We hope it will help you enjoy the simpler, cleaner expense workflow, and that you find approvals move more efficiently, with better visibility for your whole team.
Pricing and Availability
Early access for the AI Expense Agent will start in late Q1. We will be rolling out this capability to a select group of BigTime users.
Soon, Expense Agent will roll out at no additional cost for all BigTime Premier customers.
Essential and Advanced customers will have access to a 60-day trial, with the option to upgrade after the trial. During the trial period, firms are free to submit unlimited expenses through AVA.
Firms are welcome to reach out to our team for assistance evaluating operational impact and making a longer-term decision.
Get Early Access and Start Expensing With AVA
Interested in expensing with AVA? Join the waitlist and we’ll reach out as AVA’s Expense Agent becomes available to you.
