# African Alliance

[African Alliance](https://www.africanalliance.com/) is an investment banking group, providing investment banking services to businesses across the African continent. African Alliance employees frequently travel throughout Africa, incurring work expenses.

<figure><img src="/files/3OBel0qsfJKUIaW6nKfa" alt=""><figcaption></figcaption></figure>

### The Problem: Manually managing employee expenses

Each African Alliance team member was required to keep physical receipts of their expenses and submit these to the finance team in batches by the end of each month. The finance team then manually allocated the receipts, followed up on missing receipts, and reconciled the expenses on the accounting system. As the company scaled, African Alliance found that this process was too cumbersome and it was difficult to accurately keep track of employee spend.

### The Solution: Immediate expense logging and automated processing

Using [Investec Programmable Banking](https://www.investec.com/en_za/banking/tech-professionals/programmable-banking.html), African Alliance created a system where employees log their expenses immediately and the reconciliation of accounts is done automatically.

* The employee scans their receipt when they spend
* The scanned receipts are uploaded to the cloud
* On the back-end, Programmable Banking enabled African Alliance to integrate their account with [Sage](https://accounting.sageone.co.za/Landing/Default.aspx), and pull all of their transactions
* Their system automatically matches the uploaded receipts to expenses and suggests allocations before processing

### Winning with Programmable Banking

* By making it easy for employees to immediately capture their receipts, the finance team now spends less time following up with employees about missing receipts.
* The automation has also led to entire days of work being saved every month.

{% hint style="info" %}
Read more about the African Alliance expense allocation and recon system [here](https://www.offerzen.com/blog/how-african-alliance-automated-expense-allocation-to-save-time-and-costs).
{% endhint %}


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