Why now's the time to automate expense management

Technology’s supposed to make life easier, and automated expense-management does just that.

Managing T & E expenses is time consuming, involving a lot of man-hours and paperwork. Plus each T & E refund costs an estimated $70 to produce, beginning with the original employee request to the final refund.

Automating will not only make life easier for your A/P department but also open the door to lots of other possibilities – including savings.

Automating T & E allows companies to:

• monitor employee compliance with spending policies
• reduce processing and auditing costs
• reduce the chances of internal and external fraud
• improve employee productivity and satisfaction with faster processing time, and
• have greater management control and transparency of expense spending.

Employees can log onto the system and enter expenses. The system processes the request, flagging any unauthorized spending, and forwards the request to the designated department or individual(s).

Management can then run reports that tell them what they spend with certain vendors and where they’re spending the most.

Many expense report management companies offer tailored programs for small, medium and large sized companies. Some companies bundle programs with T & E expense reporting including: corporate credit card implementation, online travel booking and automated vendor invoices among others. Billing usually occurs monthly or yearly, but varies with each vendor.

Some vendors to check out: Concur, Web2Expense, Web Expenses, Spend Vision and Infor. Each vendor offers an online expense report solution and some offer offline as well. The Web sites also offer free demos — most for 30 days.

One company — Given Imaging, Inc. — implemented automated expense-management with great success. They found that, in addition to the expected benefits, they’re able to grow their company much more easily now. They can add road warriors without having to hire more back-office workers to process the extra paper work.