Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Vidya Ravella, Business Development at ABUKAI:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: ABUKAI, founded in 2010, focuses on Actionable Business Productivity. ABUKAI revolutionizes how companies conduct business with its ACTIONABLE BUSINESS PRODUCTIVITY solutions, based on new business thinking, simpler user interfaces, and supported by the latest technology. ABUKAI designs and delivers innovative solutions that significantly improve productivity for companies and their employees, thereby delivering rapid ROI.
ABUKAI Expenses is our flagship service. ABUKAI Expenses substantially reduces the time and effort required to complete expense reports with ABUKAI’s patented receipt recognition technology. ABUKAI Expenses has users in over 90 countries and 50% of the Global 500 companies. Users can complete an expense report with an extremely simple two-step process, substantially reducing the time and effort required to complete expense reports while simultaneously increasing accuracy. ABUKAI Expenses easily integrates with existing systems and can be easily tailored to a company’s process and requirements.
ABUKAI was awarded the Editors’ Choice Award by PC Magazine, and named one of the Top 20 Cloud Services. ABUKAI was also selected as one of the top 5 finance applications by NASDAQ.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: E-Mail-Based Approvals is a convenient option that allows companies to decide that certain approvers can simply review and approve reports directly from email. This is great for occasional approvers or ones that may be on the road often.
ABUKAI’s flexible Approvals Scripting Language (ASL) allows for highly customized approval flows with any level of rules. Email-Based Approvals can be configured as part of that flow depending on which approvers or under which circumstances it should be allowed. For example, a company can decide that only a few executives are allowed to approve via email and still have all the reports go through a finance team approval where all receipts are visible.
Email-Based Approvals can also highlight any policy violations. For example, if a company has a policy that meals should not cost more than $30 person, then the approver will see a warning if the “Meal” expense is over $30. They can then choose to Approve, Reject, or they can still log in to the User Portal to see the full receipt for more information. A policy could also be configured for a full stop or partial stop of the report or to trigger a different approval routing in case of a certain policy violation.
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Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: ABUKAI Expenses is the quickest and easiest way to complete expense reports. Our next-generation, patented receipt recognition technology can read data off receipts in any language with near 100% accuracy – truly in a class of its own in the market. Our service works in any language, so even receipts in Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Korean, Malay, etc. get auto-magically turned into data for the user – without having to key in any information. It’s a very hands-off approach to creating expense report – almost like you would have a personal assistant in your pocket that does it all for you.
In contrast to other solutions on the market, we take a highly flexible approach to each customer to configure the solution to meet that company’s needs and particular process and existing system. This way users can spend more time on productive tasks rather than manual data entry or filling out paperwork, but also finance, IT and other departments can have a compliant, ideal workflow in place to make their work as efficient as possible as well.
Whether it’s a salesperson that can spend more time calling on customers or a mobile technician that can spend more time turning wrenches, with ABUKAI Expenses, both the users and the finance team can benefit from time saved on manual, tedious tasks. The holistic ABUKAI approach can allow employees to focus more time on core business tasks. Not all employees have a slow Friday afternoon to do paperwork. They may be on job sites, or billing hours to clients and may not even have a computer. In reality, many of these employees just put off doing their expenses since they can’t make it to a desk to complete paperwork. This can lead to finance teams losing key visibility into spending and profitability. With ABUKAI, those employees simply need to take a photo of receipts, so they are much more likely to complete that in a timely manner versus mailing in receipts to a head office or trying to get a computer on a construction site.
ABUKAI also has several other actionable business productivity services in our application suite.
For example, ABUKAI Invoices can save companies the time spent doing data entry for Invoices and can interface in a way to automatically process incoming A/R and A/P invoices.
Q: What can we expect from your company in next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: At ABUKAI, we are constantly looking for ways to improve business productivity. We are always investing on improving our offering in terms of our business productivity services as well as creating the next generation of services.
It would be great for companies to reach out to discuss their process currently and how they are struggling with it, we can prepare a proposal for them how to optimize the process and apply some of our best practices and learnings tailored to you. Customers can speak with us rather than having to try to communicate with a chatbot.
Our approach to customers is the following: We want to grow your business and ours together with you! We can support and partner with you wherever your business takes you and even as your needs evolve. We are flexible enough to integrate with different card programs, ERPs, accounting software but also highly customized vertical solutions that you may have in place, all so that you can make the best choices for your business rather than being locked into a particular credit card program or get stuck in a specific workflow that may no longer fit your business.
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Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: ABUKAI can fully customize our services to a customer’s needs. Our flexible, unique auto-scaling platform allows to gladly put in place entire custom modules to solve customer’s very specific problems on top of our platform.
Additionally, we have a personalized approach to onboarding and account management. All customers have access to speak with ABUKAI staff, whether to ask questions, solve an issue, or provide feedback. We love feedback!
Most other vendors out there cannot deliver that set of benefits at scale like we do. We also have a very unique research capacity developing actively new core technologies, our unique patented global receipt recognition being just one example of what came out of that effort.
