Understanding the Impact of Analytics on Employee Expense Reporting and Corporate Travel Policies

Metrics matter a lot for any business. In fact, numbers help you understand your organization’s overall performance, which can help you make informed decisions. One of the core benefits is that it gives you insight into spending trends, policies, norms, and more. Traditional business means took around months to compile and analyze data; however, this can be automated with expense report software that helps analyze the data and derive actions from real-time data, saving you time and workforce.

Why Expense Analytics?

Analytics in expense reporting helps businesses compare the actual amount spent with the anticipated budget to ensure enterprise spending is not going out of control and employees are not indulging in wasteful spending.

Analytics offers finance and C-level executives’ better visibility into various aspects that include:

Employee Spending

Reports can help you understand where your employees spend corporate travel and which categories hold the most spending. The spending includes every penny spent, including cash advances, bookings, corporate card transactions, and reconciliations.

Real-time Insights

Analytics can help you identify if it is required to update your policies. Most organizations need to leverage the power of analytics in the travel and expense management segment. Around 59% of enterprises still rely on spreadsheets for expense report creation. Unfortunately, this method gives poor visibility into employee spending. This is why most enterprises are switching to travel and expense report software solutions.

Why Enterprises have to Leverage Expense Analytics

Transparency is the key

Approvers, administrators, and C-level executives look for transparency in employee spending.

Insights

Gaining insights into historical data can help you make informed decisions wisely.

Strategic Decision Making

Analytics empower the finance department to understand expense reporting trends, which helps them cut down associated costs and change corporate expense policies as needed.

Data Visualization

Data visualization plays a crucial role in analytics. This presents you with a visual representation of expense data through various visual forms that include charts, graphs, and dashboards that show the intricate details of the data. This representation empowers decision-makers to understand the spending patterns, flag expense anomalies, and strengthen expense controls across multiple business units.

Data visualization tools give businesses and their travel managers a 360-degree view of employee spending. It can be challenging for companies that use multiple solutions to manage specific needs like cost control and bookings to retrieve data and identify areas of improvement. Most organizations prefer a unified solution to manage T & E processes. An integrated corporate card with a travel booking solution provides complete access to trip details, offering an easy way to consolidate and analyze the data.

SutiExpense provides detailed insights into reporting trends and spending patterns within an organization or department. Besides, the solution evaluates various risk factors per the predefined criteria and helps organizations identify areas of non-compliance.

Predictive analytics can offer significant advantages in T & E management. Organizations can forecast expense trend accurately, which enables them to allocate resources efficiently and make data-driven decisions. Predictive analytics can consider various factors, including seasonal trends, external events, supplier trends, and more.

SutiExpense is a customizable solution that offers restricted control over data visualization. The solution helps anticipate future trends and provides insights into potential cost savings. Some sort of adjustments can be made to travel policies to eradicate unnecessary spending.

Address Travel Disruptions

When it comes to business trips, there could be unexpected issues such as flight delays, diversions, or cancellations; indeed, this can be a significant challenge for any employee. In such situations, travel managers must find alternative ways to help business travelers reach their destinations. Integrating advanced solutions can change how these challenges are addressed. Travel managers should receive constant updates about business trips, informing them about emergencies that might disrupt business trips. This allows travel managers to make swift decisions to address potential disruptions.

Having an advanced solution could suggest new travel alternatives, a task that could take longer for the travel department when done by themselves. This streamlines the rebooking process, with travel managers spending less time on it.

Personalizing Travel Experiences

Good travel experience significantly improves employee satisfaction. Enterprises can leverage analytics to customize T & E policies. It all starts with feedback that can help customize each trip. Managers can then review employee preferences and see if they can add any requests to the policies. For instance, after analyzing amenities and room preferences, managers can add similar options to employee travel policies, thereby enhancing personalized experiences. This boosts employee satisfaction and improves compliance with T & E policies.

The expense system helps analyze frequently used routes, accommodation options, and travel preferences, including preferred hotels, flights, etc. The solution populates frequently selected options, saving time in looking for preferred options. Our integrated travel booking solution offers an extensive selection of flights and hotels. The solution analyzes past travel data and offers tailored suggestions to employees for business trips.

Leveraging Travel and Expense Reporting Analytics

The following are the three key metrics for tracking expense reporting numbers:

• Visibility into employee spending, including duplicate expenses
• Track policy violations and out-of-policy submissions
• Spend vs. return ratios

These metrics can help businesses make decisions on offering incentives to loyal employees. This will encourage employees to spend wisely without undergoing any policy violations.

Check for Fraudulence

Automatic policy checks will never miss out on any fraudulent activities. Drilling down the data to line-item level enables you to view spending activities. You will also get to know about policy violation trends. For instance, if most employees violate the same policy, the trend indicates that the policy needs improvement. In this case, consider revising the policy to some extent. For instance, if employees need help to abide by the policy guidelines, you may have to consider revising the limits of expense categories to make it feasible. Data insights help businesses outline policies, consider employee satisfaction, and make it a win-win for employees and employers.

Vendor Insights

Expense data gives the finance department insights into spending by vendor category. This tracking includes how much money is spent on the same vendor and how often. If employees prefer the same vendor most often, then organizations must consider negotiating discounts with the vendor. Transportation or hotels are a few expense categories businesses tie up with for rendering services. This way, enterprises can connect with preferred suppliers to cut costs.

Targeted Spending

The best practice for tracking expense reporting is categorizing spending by department, region, or project. Let’s say your company has multiple branches; analyze how spending is happening in various cities. Evaluate where most spending is happening and in which area spending occurs. Likewise, project-wise spending can help businesses track which project has the most spending. Tracking historical data allows businesses to make the best decisions about employee spending.

Strategic Decisions

Analytics helps businesses understand the behavioral changes in employees. This can improve the business by integrating critical expense structures into the company payroll. For instance, say employees file claims for phone bills or fuel every time; the HR department can add this expense to the employee’s pay structure. Organizations that embraced expense report solutions witnessed better visibility into corporate travel expenses when compared to the conventional methods for tracking spending.

These metrics give you better control over unnecessary spending, which could cut down costs. Intuitive and comprehensive dashboards give you detailed insights into automated expense reporting and can help you leverage benefits to their fullest.

With data increasing daily, leveraging tools and technologies for any business has become essential. You can analyze the spending data, make predictions, identify trends, and do much more with expense management software in place. These insights can help businesses grow exponentially, adding a more substantial advantage to the line of business.

Managing an organization’s spending activities by analyzing data and using machine learning could lead to significant cost savings and improve the overall efficiency of the expense reporting process. Business intelligence has empowered organizations to cut down costs and make data-driven decisions.