Travel & Expense Management Challenges & their Remedies – Part Two

Efficient travel and expense management is a must for every organization. After all, every organization has a fair number of employees who travel on business purposes and managing their expenses is the responsibility of the organization. This process throws up a lot of challenges for T&E professionals, and if remedies are not sought immediately, they will escalate and snowball into a giant mess.

In the last post in this series, we saw how lack of visibility and policy enforcement can be challenging for organizations. We will continue this in this post.

Receipt management: Receipt management is another big challenge for both the employees themselves as well as the T&E professionals. If employees lose receipts, they will either have to forego the claim for a legitimate expense or request the T&E professional to let it go through without the receipt, which would be a violation of policy.

Delays: Delays, delays, and more delays. That is sometimes the nature of expense management. Delay in approvals of requests, delay in preparing expense reports, and delay in auditing reports, and delay in expense reimbursements. These delays need not be intentional either; the nature of expense management is such that delays can happen very easily if care is not taken to not let these delays creep in.

Disparate systems: Expense management is a complex process which involves several business functions and stakeholders. There is the traveling employee, the employee’s supervisor, the travel desk representative, and the financial and accounting professionals. Senior management would like to keep an eye on the whole process too.

Different stakeholders use different methods and systems to manage their responsibilities. There is no integration among these systems and therefore there is no scope for efficient collaboration or effective data transfer.

In the next post, we’ll see the remedies to these challenges.