How to Drive True Value Out of Expense Management Programs

New trends in corporate T&E management have resulted in a new wave of programmatic approaches in managing this complex spend line. Companies now have various viable options like cloud-based expense management systems, mobile applications, sophisticated data analytics, and real-time reporting functionalities. All these capabilities and technologies help you effectively manage business spends and continue to drive value out of the expense management process.

Visibility into T&E plays a key role in current intelligence and future planning and forecasting. Organizations should develop procedures to gain high visibility into business spends and use that data in proactive planning. Non-compliant spends can have direct effects on corporate travel costs, and organizations should regularly report on this metric to avoid the financial loss that arises with non-complaint T&E spends.

Companies should have intricate knowledge of the arena, and regular reporting on expenses by category. Real-time reports on expenses by category help gain intelligence over which specific areas of corporate travel are in need of consolidation. This can also help the sourcing department negotiate with important suppliers and drive cost savings around the T&E category.

Mobile expense management functionality supports greater spend management initiatives. It enables your employees to create and submit expenses while on the move. Managers can look into submitted expense reports, review and approve them instantly. Managers should have great insights into spend data, which helps for future planning and budgeting. With sophisticated software organizations can improve their financial forecasts and gain a clear view into key portions of the business budget. Companies should adopt cloud-based expense management systems in order to streamline the end-to-end processes within the expense management task. Cloud-technology helps cut expense-processing costs, enhances compliance to business travel strategy, and accelerates the approval processes.

On-demand expense management software also offers a variety of data analytics and reporting tools which can help you take efficient expense management to a new level.