Why Automation Is Critical To Control Corporate Spending?

Managing employee spending is a big challenge for large enterprises. This is due to lack of data tracking tools that can throw useful insights into employee spending. Travel expense management process is data-centric. Data flows from different sources such as employee reimbursement, accounts department, vendor invoices and credit card statements.

Moreover, travel vendor choices and payment methods are also evolving. Mobile will be the mode of travel bookings moving forward with more than half of the bookings happening through mobile. Furthermore, bookings made through Ola/Uber have increased compared to earlier.

Key factors contributing to the growth are the increase in the mobile workforce and improved business collaborations. While airfare and accommodation forms the largest cost, there are several other spends such as luggage fare, meals and local travel expenses. Gathering information from various sources into a centralized system is an arduous task as it is prone to errors, if not done right.

Most organizations function in the old way of expense filing, relying mostly on the manual data entry. Certain delays happen due to data entry and reconciliation. Lack of visibility impedes the finance and HR department in taking critical business decisions with respect to employee productivity and organizational efficiency. It prevents organizations from adhering to compliance.

Automated expense report software with advanced analytics can help convert big data from all the sources into smart data for actionable insights. This means that organizations will have real-time insights into employee spending.

Let’s say you are a sales head in an organization handling around 25 sales team spread across the country. Imagine if you have an instant view into travel and entertainment related expenses of your team, it would be easy for you to approve requests, see who are the top spenders, who is spending efficiently and track how much money is being spent in closing a deal.

It makes the entire budget planning easier and more effective for you. The insights you get can further be used to improve the efficiency of the process. You can set a daily or monthly limit for travel expenses and make sure that spending doesn’t exceed the specified budget. Alternatively, you can increase the limit on a card for any purchases that can be done instantly. This gives you an opportunity to negotiate better deals with vendors and minimize the cost of airfare and hotel bookings.

The benefits of real-time tracking and analysis are intangible. Automated expense report solutions will not only provide you travel intelligence and analytics, but also helps you with end-to-end travel bookings from requisitions, bookings, travel policies, expense claims, reimbursements and more – all from a single platform.