New Forrester Research: How Navan’s “Invisible” Expense Management Saved One Finance Team 4,300 Hours Annually

In most companies, travel is for bookings and expense is for receipts. They live in different silos. They waste different people’s time.

But when you combine the two, the efficiency compounds.

That’s what a 2026 commissioned study from Forrester Consulting found for companies using Navan's end-to-end travel and expense solution.

Here are Forrester’s findings — and the drivers behind the results.

Download the Expense Management Spotlight from Forrester Consulting, part of the Total Economic Impact(™) (TEI) study

By the Numbers

Let’s face it: Expense management has historically been defined by manual work, which only grows more onerous as a company expands.

That is, unless the company is using Navan.

At one organization Forrester interviewed, a travel manager in the payment services industry reported that making the switch to Navan resulted in a time savings of 4,300 hours annually, thanks to automated approvals and tool consolidation. That’s more than a game-changer — it’s a whole new game plan. In fact, it’s the equivalent of roughly two full-time employees. That enables employees to pivot their focus to work that’s more strategic than going through months-old receipts.

That wasn’t all. Forrester also dug into the necessary-but-onerous process of submitting expenses that employees dread, and found that Navan cut the time required by 80% for a composite organization based on interviewed customers.

In fact, by investing in both Navan Travel and Navan Expense, finance and accounting teams reduced the time spent on managing and reconciling expenses by 40%. Forrester found several contributing factors, like better data visibility, a better user experience, tool consolidation, and less training and technical maintenance.

But at the heart of it lies one basic concept: simplification.

Going “Invisible”

When it comes to optimizing expense management, it’s not enough to improve the manual process of expense reporting. Instead, it should disappear.

With Navan, it basically does. And the key is Navan’s AI-powered automation, which does the heavy lifting without employees lifting a finger. Instead of chasing errors later, Navan runs an instant audit at the moment of the transaction.

The system checks the spend against pre-configured spend policies like daily allowances or regional meal caps. In-policy spend is instantly reconciled, while violations are flagged or declined right at the terminal.

That means no more traditional expense reports, no more time-consuming expense submissions, and, for finance and accounting teams, no more detective work. They can finally stop wasting time reviewing compliant transactions or chasing down context—like verifying if a user was actually traveling or who attended that client dinner.

Extrapolate this efficiency out across your company, and the time savings begin to climb ever-higher.

Download the Expense Management Spotlight from Forrester Consulting, part of the Total Economic Impact(™) (TEI) study