In my recent blog Seven Flags Your T&E Expenses are Out of Control, I identified 7 red flags that may indicate T&E expense management is not getting its due at your company. In this blog, I will offer specific advice regarding how to address these T&E problem areas.
Here are the tips that CFOs can use to take back control of their company’s T&E expenses:
1. Review your company’s T&E policies; if you do not have them, you need to create them
Ensure policies are consistent with your company’s current and future travel needs, incentivize the use of technology available to automate T&E expense report requests to reimbursement, and are designed to mitigate the burden involved in being reimbursed on your travelers and those who manage them
Ensure policies include input from key travel groups
Ensure policies do not inhibit the timeliness of expense report submission and/or reimbursement
2. Improve the travel policy IQ of your employees
Review the policy with all travelers on an annual basis
Make sure they understand the actions under their control which can impact the timely reimbursement of expense reports
Explain how effective T&E management benefits the company, i.e., the company has no incentive to make the process difficult for them; there are costs to inefficient T&E processes and unpredictability of T&E related expenses
Ask travelers what you can do to make things easier for them (and do it)
3. Automate key components of T&E expense management
Auto-fill (parsing) technology: Extracts receipt and expense data from receipts, eliminating manual entry
Auto-created expense reports: Built by technology to create expense report matching receipt images to expense data
Direct feeds: Automated feeds sync data with accounting, HR, and corporate credit cards to eliminate manual data entry between systems
Automated approval workflows: Managers are instantly notified of electronic reports pending approval, decreasing expense report lifecycle and reimbursement times
There are many cloud-based T&E options available, which companies of all sizes are finding and leveraging for cost-effective solutions. According to the results of Certify’s Annual Expense Management Outlook: T&E Trends and Bookmarks for 2015:
57% of companies experience an ROI within the first 12 months
81% of companies experience an ROI within the first 24 months
4. Take measures to improve and enforce corporate T&E policies
Benchmark your T&E spending and policies
Align people and process, and leverage the technology you need to measure and monitor compliance with your T&E policies
5. Arm travelers with better technologies to make T&E expense management simpler and faster
Mobile applications can significantly increase the productivity of employees on the road; 14% of companies identified mobility as the #1 area of improvement for 2015
Globally accessible tools provide a single, common platform for all your employees and administrators, and they can streamline process with multiple language and currency exchange features
6. Leverage analytics to improve intelligence and data
Arm yourself with visibility into where your travelers are spending the company dime, and then compare spending trends within and across categories with industry benchmarks
Create alignment in T&E spending with your company’s key strategic objectives—what do your travelers need to spend and in which areas to impact the company’s bottom line?
T&E spending represents a meaningful business expense at your company, it’s difficult to manage, and it impacts travelers and non-travelers across your organization. Investing in T&E management effectiveness can make the lives of every company employee who travels easier, and it can result in significant cost savings with increased long-term shareholder value in the process. Now is time for all CFOs to give effective T&E management its due.
By Ernie Humphrey, from: https://www.certify.com/2015-05-26-Out-of-Control-TE-Expenses-Taming-Your-TE-Beast?s=360TLCOC&utm_source=360TLC&utm_medium=Blog-ThoughtLeadership&utm_content=OutOfControl&utm_campaign=360ThoughtLeadershipBlog