How a global pharmaceutical company saved USD 1.8 Mn by testing every expense claim, not a sample

01At a glance

02The challenge

Our expense audit tested about 2% of claims, chosen at random, three months after they were paid. With 9,000 employees filing claims in SAP Concur across India and the UAE, most of the risk went unseen. We knew there were duplicate claims, bills split to stay under approval limits, and personal spending coded as client entertainment, but we could not size the problem or prove it. Each finding took weeks of manual work, and by then the money was gone. The audit committee asked for full coverage without more headcount.

03What we did

We connected CompliBear to SAP Concur and the HR master with read-only access, on ALTeX Hub inside the client’s own cloud. In the first week we ran 120 proven expense tests, from duplicate receipts and weekend claims to split bills and mileage outliers, and added 14 rules for the client’s own policy. A machine-learning model then scored every claim for unusual patterns. Our team of three, a forensic accountant, a data engineer and a data scientist, reviewed the top exceptions with internal audit each week and valued each confirmed finding. By week six, testing ran daily and the audit team worked the exceptions itself, with the evidence for each one attached.

04What we found

05The result

• USD 1.8 Mn saved
• First finding in 3 weeks, from read-only access to SAP Concur
• 100% of 1.4 million expense lines tested, against a 2% sample before

06In their words

07What’s next

After the first quarter the client extended CompliBear to purchase-to-pay and vendor payments. Its own team now runs expense testing every month.