Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
Expense Management Background
Travel, entertainment and other non-PO expenses represent a significant outlay for most organizations, but many concede that they exercise poor control over their expenditure. Frequently relying on in-house spreadsheet templates to capture and allocate expense data, their processes are often time-consuming and inefficient, and many struggle to enforce employee compliance. Above all, while they actively seek out economies of scale in other areas of procurement, many organizations are missing the opportunity to analyse their expensed outlays and consolidate suppliers.
Building the business case for an expense management system is critical to the process of obtaining a budget and senior management buy-in. Some examples of the benefits of an expense system are listed here:
1) Expense management systems allow organizations to improve control and compliance by automating several key aspects of policy enforcement.
2) Automated systems also deploy workflows, ’self-service’ capabilities and web-based access to improve the quality of data and reduce administrative overhead.
3) Automation generates a wealth of electronic data that can be used to better analyse expenditure. With a centralized, enterprise-wide understanding of aggregate spend and the ability to drill-down into the major areas of expenditure, organizations can reduce the number of suppliers used and strike preferential volume deals with preferred partners.
4) This data also helps organizations reassess the total costs associated with other activities such as off-site training, and may establish a business case for changes to working practices.
5) Successful implementation of an expense management system rests, among other factors, on employee buy-in. Organizations are advised to take a pragmatic approach that focuses on the tangible benefits for individual users of the system, including greater convenience and the possibility of faster reimbursement.
Given the long history of business application expenses software use in the finance and HR functions, it’s curious that there are so many pockets of activity where organizations continue to rely on manual systems or home-grown programmes. It’s almost as if, having focused first and foremost on installing the core engines that manage their transactions, many businesses pause for breath and never get round to starting the next phases of their automation programmes.
Expense On Demand Ltd
Abbey House
28-30 Chapel Street
Marlow
SL7 1DD
0870 366 2300