Spotting Anomalies in Spend Patterns using Analytics

Business travel has become a crucial factor in strategic corporate planning. With more than 70% of organizations viewing T & E expense management as a strategic function, it has become quite important to link the spending and ramifications of corporate travel with the goals and objectives of the organization.

Top companies are more likely to incorporate automated analytics and business intelligence capabilities as a part of their expense management program.

The following are a few attributes that have helped organizations gain an unprecedented level of visibility into expense spending and T & E intelligence:

• Integrating intelligence into corporate planning and budgeting works for any organization. With every dollar spent playing a key role in organizational programs, it is important for companies to feed the office with intelligence when it comes to travel. Enable executives to forecast the enterprise-wide spend utilizing analytics, reporting and business intelligence.

• Around 60% of organizations are more likely to track and monitor the ROI of business travel through analytics. This helps organizations measure the true value of business trips and helps in determining whether future business travel is required for your business.

• Around 30% of organizations are more likely to utilize analytics to figure out savings opportunities within T & E spend. For this, you have to understand the volume of spending and establish good relationship with key suppliers. This data can be utilized by the procurement and sourcing units to get the best deals and negotiate discounts with airlines, hotels & other travel providers.

Real-time components of analytics and reporting will help business travelers access the data and gain key insights on the employee-initiated expenses. Most importantly, installing intelligence into analytics will help you trace out the anomalies and irregular spend patterns, which would help you identify what’s going wrong in your expense management process.