Manual Travel Request Approval Costs Indian Cos 10% Higher

Concur, a provider of integrated travel and expense management services, announced the findings of a special research conducted by Nielsen on “Understanding the Corporate Travel Expense Management Practices in India”, a first of its kind research report in India. The research, which covers over 500 companies aims at revealing in-depth insights on current practices followed by Indian organisations in managing the travel expenses of its employees.

Traditionally, India is heavily dependent on processes which are manual, laborious in nature, time consuming and prone to errors. However, there is a need for change being realised by organisations to move to an automated process which is efficient, transparent and free of human errors.

Christopher Juneau, Senior Director - Marketing, Concur Technologies, “This special research report commissioned by Concur with Nielsen not only aims at understanding the traditional travel expense management processes in India, but also helps us to understand and deliver unique solutions for the Indian marketplace. This in turn enables our customers to drive greater efficiencies into their organisations and better manage their travel spending.”

He further added, “India holds a huge potential for Concur and this study confirms what we already knew. In the current volatile economic environment in India, it becomes increasingly important for companies to spend on their travel budget as smartly as possible. In my experience, delaying an airline ticket purchase by just 6 days due to approvals will result in significantly higher airfare purchases at a minimum of 10 percent.”

Concur’s research report was put together from a sample of 507 companies across Delhi/ NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata & Pune The report throws light on the time spent by companies in expense management, errors involved in using traditional expense management procedures and the need for an evolved travel expense management software.

Key findings from the research report include:

• 66 percent of the organisations have an independent travel expense department, managed by a team of up to 10 employees (depends upon the employee strength) at the head/corporate office.

• All but 14 percent of the organisations have documented guidelines for travel expense process. Among those with documented guidelines, all of them do provide training to their employees on the same, however only half of them claimed that 76-100 percent of their employees adhere to the guidelines

• Of the claims submitted per month, accommodation, followed by flights & taxi/hired are the most included line items in a claim

• Up to 5 working days or more than that is what 95 percent of the companies take to process all travel claims, however no supporting with claim is the most common error faced by the team handling travel expense

• Only 18 percent of the organisations use expense solution software.

• 70 percent of the organisations find travel expense automation which seamlessly manages travel approvals, with cash advance requests and expense claim approval relevant to their travel expense collating and processing needs

Concur has hundreds of clients in India today and working partnerships with American Express, ICICI Bank, Citibank, AirPlus, BCD Travel, FCM, Amadeus and many more. In April 2011 it made an investment of $40 million for a minority stake in Cleartrip, the online travel portal.