You do things every day that helps your life run smoothly. Like having your boiler inspected. Or, taking your car in for an MOT. Suddenly your boiler's more efficient, as well as your vehicle. What about applying that same logic to your business?
For most organisations like yours, travel and entertainment (T&E) costs account for 10% of your operating budget, representing the second largest area of controllable spend behind payroll. Many organisations manage their T&E process with spreadsheets. But things run a lot smoother for organisations that automate this process.
In fact, automating the T&E process decreases the cost of every expense claim transaction by 78% or more and reduces the time it takes to create an expense claim by 24%. That's a significant amount of money and time saved.
Let's review four essential T&E checks for your organisation to consider in a travel and expense process.
Check 1: Leverage data and reporting
When managing T&E expenses, 52% of companies cite a lack of visibility into T&E data as one of their top challenges. If you fall into that category, you know that real-time visibility into T&E spend is crucial.
Last year, many companies experienced limited travel budgets, forcing many to re-evaluate their T&E processes. Today, it's even more critical for you to know where your spend stands against your budget. With an automated and integrated travel and expense process, organisations have a 360-degree view into all aspects of spend. When data is easy to access and available in one, central location, organisations can quickly analyse their employee spend data to optimise supplier negotiations, spend management and fraud reduction.
Not only does this help your organisation increase visibility into data and reporting, but also significantly reduces costs.
Check 2: Ensure employee expenses are accurate
Ten percent of business travellers say they always pad their expense claims. And, 9% of expense claims are submitted with errors. Managing expense claims on spreadsheets can be tedious for users, expensive to manage and worst of all, fraught with the potential for errors and even fraud.
The true link to ensuring expenses are accurate is policy compliance. But, when you're processing expenses on spreadsheets, it's a time consuming and manual process to assure or even monitor policy compliance. For example, one area of policy compliance that's often overlooked is car mileage. What types of mileage and what amount of mileage is within your policy? Automated T&E solutions identify when mileage has been edited to exceed the calculated amount and whether the commute distance has been deducted.
Businesses need strong internal controls to monitor and control expenses and policy compliance. Using an automated expense claim solution reduces out-of-policy expenses by 40 percent.
Check 3: Claim back what you're owed
If your business takes you abroad you may be entitled to a business VAT refund on a range of expenses including:
- Trade fair and conference costs
- Meals, accommodation and business entertainment
- Travel and transport costs
- Advertising and promotional costs
- Professional services
Check 4: Automatic updates
Wouldn't it be nice if your travel and expense process automatically updated, based on new legislation or even new innovations?
For example, beginning October 2010, expenses paid for travel to a temporary workplace will no longer count towards National Minimum Wage pay. How will your solution cope? Or, what about when UK VAT rises to 20% in January next year? What implication will that have on your business?
Or take new, innovative technologies for example. Managing everything on your mobile device, even your travel booking and expense claims is available. Can you manage your current T&E process from your mobile? Automated T&E solutions prepare your business for legislative changes, automatically. They even give you access to complimentary technologies, like mobile access.
In conclusion
An integrated travel and expense solution, like Concur® Travel & Expense, gives businesses exactly what they need: one seamless solution that streamlines all aspects of their travel and entertainment expenses. What does that mean, it means that by automating this process, Concur puts organisations in complete control by eliminating the traditional expense claim and automatically reconciling what was booked with what was actually spent.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, like Concur Travel & Expense, makes managing the T&E process easy and cost efficient for businesses like yours. Our solutions are available anywhere, anytime.
One thing's for sure: If you're still managing your T&E process on a spreadsheet, you're costing your business more money and more time than you would if this process was automated.
Want to learn more about the benefits of an automated solution? Watch this informative video and you'll realise the benefits of an end-to-end T&E solution.
