Inoapps Adventures in AI

There’s still a lot of hype about AI, but Inoapps continues with our mission to uncover and develop AI solutions that solve everyday business challenges, and come up with practical AI use cases to help our customers improve the ways they work. Let me fill you in on what we’ve been up to lately.

Tackling the tedium of expenses

Here at Inoapps we have hundreds of expense submissions every month across our projects. Thousands of expense lines to deal with.

Everyone hates doing expenses. Its tedious and time consuming. You have to take pictures of the receipts, upload them, assign them to the appropriate expense claim. It’s mind numbing and it’s also very easy to make mistakes.

Then, as part of our internal governance, every claim goes through a review process to ensure project, tax and audit coding is correct, and that it’s compliant with our expenses policy. It’s a lot of manual effort for our Finance team.

How can AI help us here?

We started thinking about how Generative AI could help us make receipt submission faster, smoother, and more intelligent.

With that in mind, we looked into Oracle’s powerful Document Understanding AI service. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Document Understanding is a cutting-edge AI service that lets you efficiently extract critical data from documents.

Instead of manually entering information, you use prebuilt AI models to retrieve text, tables, and other structured details from files. This data can then be presented to downstream applications via REST API processes, allowing subsequent loading and processing—reducing human error and saving time. 

Meet InoExpenses: AI-driven receipt processing and auditing

Inoapps uses Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Due to some unique business processes, we don’t use Oracle Cloud ERP Expenses and instead extend our ERP for expense entry with Oracle Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Therefore, we couldn’t use the built-in Oracle Cloud ERP Document Understanding AI facility. However, Oracle offers these AI services for external systems to use, so we could still implement this powerful AI service for our solution.

Using OCI Document Understanding, InoExpenses lets us upload receipt images, automatically extract relevant data and add it for expense claims. No more manual entry.

Here’s how it works

Here’s the structured AI-powered workflow

1. Upload. Select and upload multiple receipts using your phone. This lets you deal with receipts as they happen rather than having to face the arduous task at a later point. Once receipts are uploaded, they’re stored in a staging area.
2. Processing. Next, a background process is automatically invoked and receipts are processed through the OCI Document Recognition Analyze Document APIs.
3. Document recognition. Individual receipts are uploaded to OCI, ready to be processed by document recognition.
4. AI-driven data extraction. Each receipt goes through document recognition, values are extracted and stored.
5. Expense claim creation. You select extracted receipt data to add to an expense claim.
6. Approvals. Once you’re happy the claim includes all relevant receipts, it’s ready for submission and enters the standard expenses approval workflow.

Now over to the Finance team

Finance teams can also use InoExpenses for automated expenses analysis—using AI to audit monthly expenses against corporate policy to check for anomalies or questionable claims.

Gone are the days of needing to trawl through submitted expenses line by line, checking for duplicate entries, unclear descriptions, or to ensure values match receipts. AI scans every receipt and expense line, analyzes trends, and reports back its findings in minutes.

We did have a laugh when we got an alert for the purchase of coffee pods, stating that this appears to be a personal purchase, when it was just our office manager stocking up the office.

By harnessing Oracle’s AI-powered Document Understanding, Inoapps is transforming manual processes into automated, intelligent workflows. And with it, we have another excellent, practical use case for AI—an AI-driven approach that reduces errors, speeds up expense processing, and seamlessly integrates with existing business systems.

Keep an eye on our blogs to follow our AI adventures

Our journey with AI has just started. At Inoapps, we believe in real-world AI applications that enhance business performance, empower employees, and solve practical challenges.

We’re cutting through the hype, listening to customer needs, and continually evolving our approach to deliver AI solutions that meet real business needs.

This is just one example of how Inoapps continues to invest in AI innovation, and we’re excited to share where we go next.

If you want to explore the potential of AI for your business, get in touch with the Oracle AI experts at Inoapps—we’d love to hear your use case.

Want to know more about Oracle AI? Explore our blogs