Out with the old - in with the new!

In our fast paced technology driven world, companies today rely on new innovative solutions to replace old 'non-value added' internal and external accounting and administrative processes. The following functions represent just a few that have greatly benefited by the emergence of new software driven solutions: human resources management, accounting, payroll, external and internal mail delivery, document and data management, inventory management, purchasing and point of sale systems. These new and enhanced software solutions have provided many corporations with the ability to automate and streamline these processes and ultimately save many thousands of dollars.

A process considered by many corporations as long overdue for change is the manual function of travel expense reporting. In our high-tech corporate environments, where technology has virtually eliminated most manual processes, we still see that when it comes to travel expense reporting, most companies still require traveling employees to manually put pen to paper and complete travel expense reports for reimbursement. As the cost of business travel continues to rise, corporations are continually looking for ways to reduce their direct travel costs. Not only are corporations trying to reduce their direct costs of travel, but they are also paying greater attention to their ability to reduce the indirect cost of travel. The largest component of indirect costs is the expense report process.


Determining the cost to process a single expense report

To determine the cost of administering a single expense report, we should first look at the expense report cycle. The chart below breaks the cycle into three distinct elements. It is imperative for all companies to look carefully at each single element of their own expense report cycle to determine their company's processing costs.

As we have seen in most other finance and administration processes, automation is the key to obtaining process improvement and ultimately cost savings. It is inevitable that companies who implement an automated end-to-end expense management solution, and address every element of the expense report cycle will save the most amount of money than those who only partially address this expense cycle.