5 Steps for Effective T & E Management
There are five stages of Travel and Expense Management (TEM) that correlate to an organization’s lifecycle. As the company grows by the workforce, product lines and geographically, inefficient TEM processes would result in decrease productivity, revenue, and employee dissatisfaction. So, here are the five stages for effective travel and expense reporting that will help you determine the growing pains of your company.
Excel-based Expense Reporting
Using spreadsheets to manage travel and entertainment expenses is a popular way for companies to start with TEM. But, as the company grows this approach stops working. Manually reconciling expense reports become increasingly time-consuming and result in errors when importing data from reports into the accounting system.
Travel and Expense Software
The next stage is a transition from spreadsheets to expense management applications. The benefit is the ability to automatically reconcile transactions with back-end accounting systems. Automation is just a step away however employees still need to handle piles of receipts and there is no visibility into transactions for accounting departments.
Mobile/Cloud Applications
Organizations can leverage the benefits that mobile applications offer to the workforce; for example, employees can efficiently account for their expenses in real-time with a mobile app. Also, when employees capture receipts, they will get automatically populated into an expense record, eliminating receipt loss and saving a lot of employee time.
Integrated Platform
If your workforce travels often and book outside the corporate booking systems, you’d be missing corporate discounts. Taking advantage of integrated travel and corporate booking systems can deliver significant savings over time. Not only you can benefit from corporate rates, but the company can gain real-time visibility into spending. Also, reclaiming value-added tax (VAT) becomes easy with integrated travel and expense solution.
Intelligent Procedures
Adding intelligence to the travel and expense management solution helps you to head off needless expenses before they actually happen and allows employees make to smarter, policy-based decisions. Also, taking pre-trip authorization approach avoids unplanned expenses from happening.
Embracing all the above would result in new benefits such as improved productivity, reduced staff time, decreased T & E costs, and increased compliance.
Get a product demo today and find out how SutiTravel can streamline your business travel and expense management process.
