How Brightwater Advisory Group stopped rebilling clients for out-of-policy travel and reclaimed 31 AP hours a week
Brightwater's consultants travel four days a week, and a large share of that spend is rebilled to clients under negotiated travel caps. When clients started disputing hotel and meal lines on invoices, the firm needed a way to catch policy breaches before a single expense reached a client bill.
The challenge
Brightwater runs engagements for healthcare systems and regional banks across the US, the UK and India. Consultants book through the firm's travel agency, pay on Amex corporate cards, and submit everything through SAP Concur. Roughly 64% of T&E is rebilled to clients, each with its own travel rider: one hospital network caps hotel nights at $229 in Chicago, another prohibits any alcohol on rebilled meals, and two banking clients require itemized receipts for every meal over $40.
Concur's native audit rules checked report totals and receipt presence, but they could not read a hotel folio and tell the difference between a room rate, a resort fee, a $38 parking charge and a $96.50 in-room dining order. The shared services team in Pune sampled about one report in eight. Client invoice disputes on travel lines rose for three straight quarters, and each one consumed partner time to resolve.
The firm also had a quieter problem. A recurring pattern of consultants submitting the same Uber rides on both a corporate card and a personal reimbursement had gone unnoticed because the two flows were reviewed by different people, in different weeks, in different tools.
How they rolled out Phyto Nex AI
Brightwater connected Concur, Amex and Workday Financials in read-only mode and loaded each client's travel rider as a project-scoped policy layer. Phyto Nex AI evaluates every line item against the firm handbook first, then against the client rider attached to the Workday project code on the report. A $64 dinner with one glass of wine is compliant for internal work and flagged when it carries a code for a client that prohibits alcohol.
Line-item OCR read hotel folios from 212 different properties in the first quarter, including multi-page folios from London and Bengaluru where tax lines are interleaved with incidentals. The team set the folio rule to separate room and tax from everything else, then route incidentals to the client-rider check before the report can be marked billable.
Pushback drafts went out through Microsoft Teams, which every consultant already had open. Messages were written to be short enough to read between client meetings and to cite both the firm clause and, where relevant, the client rider. The shared services team approved messages in batches twice a day.
Cross-card duplicate detection compared the Amex feed, Concur cash expenses and the travel agency's booking data on a rolling 45-day window, with fuzzy matching on merchant, amount within $1.50, and timestamps within two hours.
The results
Over six months Phyto Nex AI flagged $212,480 in out-of-policy and duplicate spend before it reached a client invoice. Of that, $58,930 was duplicate submissions, mostly ride-share and rail fares claimed twice. Consultants resolved 91.8% of flags directly in Teams, usually by removing non-billable lines from the rebill or uploading a missing itemized receipt.
The shared services team moved from sampling one report in eight to reviewing only the 6.2% of reports Phyto Nex AI escalates. That reclaimed 31.4 hours a week across four analysts, time the team now spends on client billing reconciliation instead of receipt inspection.
Client disputes on travel invoice lines fell 73% year over year across the same set of clients. Two engagement partners now share the Phyto Nex AI audit summary with client procurement as part of quarterly business reviews.