Michael Baker International

Michael Baker International Achieved Its Cleanest Financial Close Ever With Predictive Analytics

An Expense Process That Could Not Scale With Growth

Michael Baker International (MBI) needed more than a place to enter expenses. For them, expenses aren’t just back-office administration. They dictate client billing, cash flow, and financial accuracy.

As MBI grew, its Oracle-based expense process couldn’t keep up.

The old system lived inside their ERP. On paper, that made sense. In practice, it was a nightmare. Submitting a simple reimbursement was clunky, laborious, and required too many tedious steps. Employees found the process frustrating and inefficient, which naturally drove down system adoption.

Reimbursements took an average of 25 days, leaving employees waiting weeks to be repaid for business expenses.

For program managers and finance leaders, extracting financial information was just as painful. Stakeholders said they felt like they needed a “doctorate degree” to pull a simple report. When they finally got the data, it arrived as a raw dump that required extensive manual manipulation.

Teams spent countless man-hours sifting through spreadsheets to determine what was actually relevant and whether they could trust the final numbers.

The lack of visibility created a ripple effect across the business. Project managers couldn’t see draft or pending expenses. Outstanding transactions sat unresolved for months, sometimes as long as four to nine months.

Billable expenses regularly missed client billing windows, forcing MBI to write off thousands of dollars to overhead.

What began as an expense management problem had become a business operations problem. The system was eating up time, creating confusion, and hurting the bottom line.

MBI needed a better way to manage spend—one that could give employees a simpler experience while providing stakeholders with timely, trustworthy information.

Challenges

• Multi-step manual entry processes hurt system adoption and slowed reimbursements.
• Extracting actionable insights took hours of manual work.
• Spend visibility and control were fragmented across projects and teams.
• Late expense submissions caused costly client write-offs.
• Year-end financial close was messy and required heavy accruals.

Results

• Reduced reimbursement time by 82%, from 25 days to 4.5 days.
• Increased corporate card adoption from 54% to 86.8%.
• Saved 10 hours per month with automated delegate reporting.
• Processed more than 90% of spend within 30 days.
• Generated $30,000 in measurable savings and rebate revenue.
• Exported 98.6% of expenses before year-end close, accruing just 1.4%.

Why Emburse

MBI knew it needed more than just a software swap. It needed a system that worked the way its people did, and it chose Emburse Enterprise and Emburse Analytics to support its growing organization.

The finance team treated the Emburse rollout not as an IT project, but as a culture shift. It launched live training, short task-based videos, and written cheat sheets to support every learning style across the 4,000-person company.

As adoption grew and cleaner data started flowing into the platform, MBI was able to simplify processes, reduce manual work, and help teams make better decisions.

Putting Data in the Right Hands

Using Emburse Analytics, MBI tackled visibility by building role-specific dashboards.

The CFO can now track high-level spend across the business, while program managers can monitor draft and pending reports for their projects in real time.

Instead of relying on AP to answer questions or pull reports, stakeholders can access the information themselves. Project managers began proactively following up on outstanding expenses before they affected billing timelines.

Automating the Delegate Grind

Analytics showed that delegates handled 83.5% of expense activity, with many supporting 30 to 40 employees at a time.

To save them from manually reviewing every profile, MBI created automated burst reports. These reports arrive in delegate inboxes twice a week and flag transactions more than 25 days old, helping delegates prioritize follow-up activities.

Taking Control With Intelligent Insights

MBI didn’t stop at improving visibility.

The finance team used Emburse to identify rules that caused unnecessary workflow friction, such as “possible duplicate” warnings that were technically correct but did not align with actual business practices. The rule was refined to better reflect how employees worked.

The team also identified a recurring issue in which employees submitted receipts without attaching the corresponding corporate card transaction. This led to incorrect reimbursements and additional collection work.

A new rule helped reduce the issue and improve payment accuracy.

Looking deeper into transaction data, MBI found that more than half of its 101,000 AMEX transactions were purchases under $50.

Instead of manually reviewing every transaction, MBI automated approvals for low-risk purchases, freeing analysts to focus on higher-value work.

Driving Smarter Training and App Adoption

Rather than relying on generic, company-wide reminders, MBI used data to target specific behaviors.

By monitoring return rates, the team identified exactly why reports were being sent back. Those insights shaped monthly training sessions and enabled the team to deliver targeted support to employees who needed additional help.

The same data-driven approach improved adoption of the Emburse mobile app, making receipt capture and expense submission easier for employees across the organization.

Boosting Vendor and Card Savings

With Emburse Analytics, MBI could identify employees who were still relying on out-of-pocket spending and move them onto the AMEX program.

The increased use of corporate cards also created new opportunities for analysis. By reviewing vendor activity across the business, the team identified redundant software subscriptions that could be consolidated by IT.

Business Impact: From Manual Bottlenecks to Proactive Decision-Making

Happier Employees and Faster Payouts

Employees no longer wait weeks to get their money back.

By promoting mobile receipt capture and simplifying approvals, MBI reduced reimbursement wait times from nearly a month—24.6 days—to just 4.5 days.

Mobile app usage also increased from 2% to 28%, helping employees submit expenses on the go instead of holding onto paper receipts.

Total Visibility and No More Expense Pile-Ups

Targeted training and active monitoring increased corporate card adoption from 54% to nearly 87%. This gave finance much clearer visibility into company spend.

Meanwhile, automating the reporting process saved delegates approximately 10 hours every month.

Instead of allowing older transactions to accumulate for months, the team could stay ahead of them before they became a problem.

Measurable Financial Gains

Better spend visibility created a measurable financial impact across the business.

MBI eliminated write-offs from late-submitted billable expenses, improved cash flow through more timely client billing, and identified $14,000 in software savings through vendor consolidation.

Increased AMEX adoption also generated an additional $16,000 in rebate revenue, adding another layer of value on top of the operational gains.

A Record-Breaking Year-End Close

All of these operational improvements combined to deliver MBI’s cleanest financial close on record.

The finance team exported 98.6% of its $25 million in expenses directly into its Oracle ERP, leaving only 1.4% to accrue. Of that small fraction, only $28,000 was more than 30 days old.

Looking ahead, the team continues to identify new opportunities to automate spend management.

These opportunities include exploring an Amazon Business integration to streamline receipt management across nearly 4,800 Amazon transactions, as well as enabling the Egencia receipt feed to automatically bring travel receipts into the expense process.

About Emburse

Emburse orchestrates corporate spend across travel, expense, reimbursements, AP, and payments with AI-powered control and insight.

Serving more than 20,000 organizations in 200 countries and territories worldwide, Emburse gives finance leaders the agility to mitigate risk, ensure compliance, and drive strategy.

Unlike legacy all-in-one platforms, Emburse delivers modern infrastructure that powers business growth.