According to a poll by Levvel research, firms that adapted Travel and Expense Management (TEM) systems could increase the efficacy of their settlement procedures by 71 percent, enhance their visibility over-spending by 66 percent, and reduce processing costs by 53 percent. The need to effectively manage the complexities of T&E processes may be that the driving force behind firms of all sizes flocking to TEM systems.
Let's take the example of a common company trip--state your sales manager will be attending an global trade expo. Their company trip can be broken into 3 stages. The pre-trip process involves them creating a traveling request and getting it approved. While they are on the journey they record the incurred expenses. Finally, post-trip, they combine their expenses to generate a study, submit the report to the approver, and once it's approved, receive their reimbursement. As the stream appears to be simple, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. With the perfect features, you'll be able to automate these methods in a streamlined method.
Here are some key features that could enhance your firm's cost management process:
Multiple users: An ideal investment management system should offer different functionalities to distinct users. Your administrator should have the ability to add several users and assign roles based on permission degrees --hence your employees are going to be able to get only the data your admin would like them to. For example, whilst the sales department head needs to oversee the approval process for an entire department, the sales engineer coverage on them only must publish their travel expenditure report. Providing role-based accessibility ensures data security.
Implement travel policies: Using this feature, your administrator may configure the TEM system depending on your firm's travel policies, even from cost limits to each diems, mileage expenses, and approval workflows. This can help your firm improve its policy compliance rate and protect against misuse of travel funds. Different divisions on your firm may have different spending requirements and investment limitations, so a great TEM system will allow you to execute different policies for each one.
Localization of a diems: Since the price of traveling varies for different nations, the TEM system should give you the capacity to establish rates for traveling, lodging, meals, and incidentals depending on the traveling destination. Using this feature, you're going to find a way to automatically waive per diems to your employees dependent on the united states they're going to, rather than manually configuring spending limits whenever that an employee creates a visit request. This also helps your travel team to track each diem expenses for unique countries separately.
On-trip:
Auto-scanning of Automobiles: This feature simplifies the process of documenting expenses to a terrific extent. Your employees will no longer need to list each expense by hand or worry about lost receipts. The electronic copies of these receipts are subsequently stored so long as they are needed.
Email receipts forwarding: With this feature, your employees could merely forward their electronic receipts to the e mail address provided by the TEM system and the system will automatically create expenditure trades for those receipts.
Your TEM system needs to make it easy to track the cost by exporting expenses into relevant categories automatically. While setting up the device your administrator will need to add vendors/merchants into the device and choose the appropriate category. Once that is accomplished, expenses comprising the merchant's name will be auto-categorized (as meals/travel/accommodation) based on the previous admissions during Auto Scan. As an instance, a receipt from Starbucks would be auto-categorized as meals expense.
Now your employees could easily categorise these expenses and then apply the correct tax rates to each point thing. For instance, by the end of these hotel stay, your employee could be handed a bill for the accommodation, room services and parking, etc.. With this feature, each investment listed from the bill could be swiped separately and the proper tax rate can be implemented on each individual line item.
Your employees will record their mileage expenses by going into the exact distance travelled or the start and end result of these vehicle's odometer. However, the most convenient way is to use GPS tracking in a mobile expenditure application to capture the mileage.
Credit-card integration: Providing corporate bank cards to workers depended on business trips improves spending transparency, and prevents overtraining, and reduces fraudulent expenses. Your travel manager can set spending limits to your cards, therefore each employee gets a card with a assigned budget.
By incorporating your TEM platform by means of your credit card provider, you also can empower automatic bank packs or direct feeds -- card trades are pulled out of the bank into your TEM process. Your employees could certainly convert the card trades into expenses having a few clicks rather than re entering the expenses. Also, this makes sense easy as you don't need to spend time manually fitting transactions.
Post-trip:
Automate expense report creation and submission: by hand creating and submitting expense reports is painstakingly time-consuming. This is why you should try to find a TEM system that simplifies this procedure. Using automation, the unreported expenses in the particular date range will be automatically grouped to produce a record. This document will soon be automatically submitted to the delegated approver.
Get a handle on expenditure theft: Your TEM system should have policy controls to flag and detect policy violations in expense reports . Ideally, perhaps replicate entries are flagged based on the dates and amounts, so the employee can either merge or delete the duplicate entrance.
Automated consent workflows: Rule-based automated work flows reduce manual intervention and shorten the approval process. Your administrator may place approval rules to sort the expense reports depending on the criteria employed. For example, you may set approval rules for expense reports surpassing a certain limit to be forwarded to the finance manager to your last approval. Also, if you have many divisions on your firm, you may make separate workflows for each section to process the trouble reports.
Auto-approval and also auto-rejection of expenditure accounts: Your approvers should find a way to set criteria for auto-approving or even auto-rejecting expense reports. As an instance, a line manager will place criteria to get the expense report free of coverage violation to become approved without intervention. It's really a win win for both -- both the approver and the employee.
High level Analytics: TEM systems offer a diverse pair of real time analytic reports on expenses, investment reports, reimbursements, policy violations, and much more. With all these stats, you can track every penny spent and gain insight into the traveling expenses. You're able to view the analytic reports dependent on location, department, employee, or investment category to get yourself a break down of the top policy violators, the areas where a majority of your T&E funds are being spent, the coverages being violated, and so forth.
You might also build custom analytical reports to focus on specific data collections which may possibly not be part of their reports that are built-in. Using these, the traveling team will make alterations to the traveling policies and T&E funding by assessing the true traveling paying contrary to the planned travel budget. You might even automate analytical report creation by scheduling all these reports in order delivered into your current email address.
It should provide seamless data transport, and therefore that you don't need to export and import your business's expenditure data. Look for TEM systems that incorporate nicely with your bookkeeping software, different payment approaches, HR and payroll applications, booking tools (like Uber along with Lyft), CRM system, and also other software.
