How Smart Finance Teams Maximize Efficiency and Minimize Risk With an AI-Powered Audit Engine

Every finance team has a version of the same story. An expense transaction looks fine at first glance, with no obvious red flags. So it gets approved — not because someone verified it, but because their approval queue has 50 more expenses behind it. Multiply that by thousands of transactions and different reviewers, and your controllers have a messy month-end close to clean up.

But AI has changed what’s possible. With Navan’s new AI-powered Audit Engine and native Anti-Corruption and Bribery audit check, finance teams are reviewing fewer expenses, catching the right violations, and closing their books faster … all without the traditional month-end scramble.

The Hidden Risks of Manual Review

For finance teams, wasted hours and missing receipts are the least of their worries. They also have to think about:

• Liability risk: Controllers are personally accountable for the accuracy of financial records, and every unreviewed receipt represents potential exposure.
• Reimbursed fraud: AI-generated receipts, duplicate submissions, and prohibited spend that looks legitimate can all slip through the cracks.
• Regulatory exposure: For companies operating globally, a single transaction with a politically exposed person or sanctioned individual can trigger FCPA violations carrying million-dollar fines — and traditional T&E tools aren’t built to catch them.

Companies typically throw money at third-party tools or additional headcount to handle these common problems. But even if headcount could scale with transaction volume (and it can’t), policies still get applied inconsistently, and receipts still pile up or go missing.

Why? The fundamental problems are scale and consistency. And humans simply can’t handle either — at least, not at the volume demanded by modern travel and expense management.

Fortunately, there is a technology that can: AI.

Set the Bar Once. Enforce It Everywhere

Navan’s AI-powered Audit Engine takes the manual approach and turns it on its head. Instead of asking finance teams to catch every violation or other issue, team members simply share their policy and configure which of our 45 plus audit checks they want enforced. The engine handles the enforcement automatically — approving, flagging, or denying transactions at the point of swipe, not weeks later.

Admins maintain total control over their audit checks and can view real-time dashboards that show which checks are triggered, what percentage of transactions are auto-approved, and more.

The result is a system that scales what finance and accounting teams can accomplish: AI handles the volume, consistency, and pattern recognition at scale. On average, 75% of all expenses are auto-approved[a], and in the first quarter of 2026 alone, Navan’s Audit Engine has flagged two million transactions for auditing. That means your people only spend their time on decisions that actually require judgment, not on rubber-stamping a queue.

That’s exactly what happened when software company Pendo switched to Navan. “We previously had to review every single expense report,” said Kylee Bloodworth, the company’s senior director of global accounting. “Now, thanks to auto-approval of expenses within our thresholds, we save at least ten hours each week. Plus, employees are reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses with five days of approval, which is much faster than before.”

Audit Checks Customers Trust

Here’s a closer look at a few of Navan’s 45-plus audit checks saving customers time, money, and risk every day.

Prohibited Items and Custom Keywords

A $47 lunch receipt looks fine at first glance, but human eyes could easily miss the $12 line item for a gift card buried at the bottom. Not AI. It reads the fine print inside itemized receipts, catching hidden items like alcohol, gift cards, and tobacco. Even better, companies can add their own keywords, customizing what gets enforced automatically across every expense.

Here’s what Navan customers currently flag the most:

AI-Generated Receipts

Fake receipts used to be easy to spot. Blurry logos, wrong fonts, round numbers. Not anymore. As image generation models improve, AI-generated receipts are becoming indistinguishable from real ones, at least to the human eye. Navan uses AI to catch AI. We've flagged hundreds of fraudulent receipts this year alone, and that number is growing as the technology becomes more sophisticated. Can you tell if this image is AI generated?

Watch this video to learn more.

Off-Trip Spend

Here’s something standalone card providers miss entirely. A dinner expense from Chicago seems reasonable, but not when the transaction is auto-matched against travel records showing the employee was in Dallas that day. Without integrated travel data, finance teams would have to undertake the grueling task of expense to trip — if they can even find the information. But when your expense platform knows the full trip context, out-of-city and weekend spend gets flagged automatically.

Excessive Tipping

A few extra dollars here and there sounds like a minor issue, right? But it can slip through unnoticed, and it compounds fast. Navan flagged some 40,000 instances of excessive tipping in 2025 alone, and close to 30,000 instances so far in 2026. To enable the feature, teams simply set a tipping threshold, and every receipt gets measured against it. They can stop eyeballing line items and start managing real exceptions.

Anti-Corruption and Bribery

For enterprise compliance teams navigating global regulatory risk, this is the check that changes everything. Bank-level FCPA screening runs against the Refinitiv (now LSEG World-Check database) in real time, identifying politically exposed persons and sanctioned individuals the moment they appear in an expense. The check runs silently in the background — employees aren’t tipped off, and compliance teams get visibility they’ve never had before.

Every flagged transaction is a problem that didn't become a headline. Every auto-approval is an hour your team spent on something that actually matters. That's what happens when the system does the work.

Ready to close your books with confidence? See the audit engine in action.