The Expense Management Trends in 2019

What are the trends in corporate travel and expense management? In the world of corporate travel, predictions get going for expense management. Here are a few predictions for the coming years that help you to gain insights into employee expectations with respect to corporate travel management:

Mobility is Critical 

Mobility is the most-desired capability of expense management. As organizations become increasingly global and employees using smart devices to manage business operations, they expect to do everything on the mobile instead of a desktop. Make sure that users get exceptional experience, irrespective of the device they are using.

Thanks to the responsive design for enabling business travelers to easily create, submit and approve multiple expense reports from their mobile devices. The mobile app should feature the same user interface, so users don’t have to spend more time in learning navigation.

Another prediction is on optical character recognition (OCR), which is the most critical aspect as mobility. Corporate travelers can quickly snap a receipt and upload in the expense solution and don’t have to go back to the system to edit information extracted by the OCR. Fortunately, OCR technology is capturing receipts with over 95% accuracy, so you don’t have to edit the information.

Thanks to advanced technologies such as OCR for making it easy to read the receipt and identify the merchant. New language capabilities to be added so users can benefit from this feature.

Integrations and Machine Learning Capabilities

Integrations and machine learning can drastically reduce the amount of input required for expense reports – from receipt submission to data management. Travelers can have transactions to flow directly into the expense system, without the need to manually enter the details. These direct integrations are essential and minimize the efforts that corporate travelers required to create expense reports.

For instance, integrating corporate cards with the expense system makes the reconciliation process easy. Although machine learning and AI are evolving technologies, there are various areas where they can prove helpful. The ability to assign GL codes based on the submissions and expense categories are some areas that could benefit from machine learning and reduce the number of clicks required to submit an expense report.

More Regulations

Whether it is tax or submission of inappropriate business expenses, expense report solutions will continue to play a vital role in enforcing compliance. Finance leaders must ensure that expense solutions should be updated as regulations change. The ability to detect fraudulent expense claims, in-depth data analysis and auditing capabilities will become critical features in the long run.