Managing Business Travel & Expense on the Cloud

Some business professionals have always believed that the best way to travel is with someone else’s money.

In addition, business travelers spend an inordinate amount of time verifying travel policies for booking, sorting through receipts from multiple trips, copying or scanning receipts, and keeping track of expense details. It also considerably adds to the Finance & Accounting team’s workload of cataloguing and approving reimbursement requests. Sometimes even it adds to the cost of outsourcing such claims processing.

Why manage Business Travel & Expense (T&E) on the Cloud?

A recent report by the Aberdeen Group estimates the average cost to manually process an expense report to be $18, versus $8 for an automated transaction. The same report also says that while manual claims processing takes 30-90 days for reimbursement, automation reduces that time to 3 days or less.

In spite of such expenditures on both time and money, any business in today’s competitive environment cannot afford to bypass or avoid business travel. Moreover the Global Business Travel Association also reports that such expenses would increase by 3.4% in 2014.

However when enterprises attempt to reduce travel expenses, they face steep challenges due to outdated travel and expense management processes and policies.

The generic pain-points faced by enterprises in the requisition and approval workflow of travel related expense reimbursements are:

• Being Paper based in most cases such workflows consume more productive hours in terms of filling up forms & transcripting them for electronic payment
• Takes a very long time in approval, processing and payment as concerned approvers have to sign the physical document which cannot be shared anytime & from anywhere. This delay might create employee grievances.
• There is no system in place that tracks and controls an employee’s expenditure while effectively enforcing the employer’s corporate finance policy
• No support for Real-time statistics or actionable reports for management reporting
• Has an associated cost & effort needed to catalogue claims for future reference

How to manage T&E on the Cloud?

PeopleWorks being an HRMS which strives to save you time & effort on every routine office job, the T&E module was one of our priorities in terms of product enhancement. It was recently rolled out as an optional module for all our new & existing clients in November, 2013. The four stages in the PeopleWorks T&E Process Flow are:

1. Travel: Plan travel, book expense and even pre-approve it before the travel
2. Expense: Submit expense reports with valid and policy compliant documents
3. Reimburse: Built-in workflow and audit rules enable quick & easy expense approval by the concerned people. Approved expenses are added to payroll or deposited in claimant’s bank account.
4. Analyze: All digitally stored approved claims are the basis to analyze insights & trends in T&E

Advantages of managing T&E on the Cloud

Digitizing the claims submission, approval & reimbursement workflow is the primary solution provided by the T&E module of PeopleWorks in order to aptly address all the above mentioned pain-points. Thus the resultant gain-points or the value-proposition of using the T&E module of PeopleWorks are:

• Anywhere, anytime claim submission & approval with just an internet enabled device. This helps in reducing the exorbitant amounts of money spent on paper related processes such as purchasing, printing and shipping expense reports. It also has the option to upload scanned documents as proof for verification by RO, REV, CFO, Audit and Finance department, credit card documents and cash receipts with multiple currency support.
• Superior control over incurred expenses with designation & policy linked expense limit setups. The pre-approved travel workflow collects crucial information such as reason for trip, trip duration, other traveling employees and estimated cost for managers to make informed decisions. With its advanced intelligence and on-board analytics, extraneous expenses are history.
• Fully Automated Expense Management focuses on reducing latency and increasing cost efficiency of the claims processing & reimbursement workflow.
• Real-time T&E statistics with exportable data query and reports to analyze the travel needs & expense trends of individuals or departments for managerial planning & decision making
• Digital cataloguing of all approved claims in a cloud repository for future reference & analytics.

 PeopleWorks is a cloud based employee lifecycle management solution with interlinked modules to manage all aspects of an employee’s life from hire to retire. Along with Payroll, Performance Tracking, Employee data management, Advanced Attendance, Travel & Expense and many more such functionalities of smart HCM it would surely help your business achieve Growth Uninterrupted. For more information on PeopleWorks , please drop us a mail at peopleworks@localhost or visit www.peopleworks.in or connect through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.