Travel Expenses On A Spreadsheet? Time To Upgrade

With IT and business being increasingly spoken in the same breath CIOs are expected to make direct impact on business, either through enabling new revenue streams or cutting down costs. Talking of cost cutting, identifying and eliminating resource gutting and non-core processes holds the key. Travel expense management is one such area that can provide an easy opportunity for CIOs to showcase some significant cost savings through the use of IT.

Consider these findings of a Nielsen study commissioned by Concur, and one realises the immense potential that lies therein for CIOs to drive business impact: up to six days on an average is what it takes for approval to book travel, a delay which can drive up the airfare by a minimum of 10 percent and up to five days or more is what 95 percent of the companies take to process all travel claims. Further, 33 percent companies on average take at least two days every month to correct errors in travel expense related claims. Now, that is considerable time lost, resources wasted, and additional costs incurred.

The time is apt for the organisations to replace these manual, labour intensive, time consuming and error-prone practices with automation tools that are efficient, transparent and can facilitate travel expense management without human errors. “The travel expense management tools should be a welcome move for enterprises with presence in multiple locations. This will cut down a lot of time and complexity and bring transparency in the process,” says Jayabalan Subramanian, CTO, Netmagic.

Interacting with Biztech2.com, Christopher Juneau, Senior Director- Marketing, Concur Technologies, shares some key business benefits that IT Heads can expound through automating the travel expense management processes.

Productivity Gains And More: In the present volatile economic scenario, companies need to tighten their purse strings and spend on their travel budget as wisely as possible. Automation will help optimise the entire process, in terms of reducing errors and enhancing the speed at which it moves forward, thereby resulting in reduced costs. It is estimated that post-automation, companies can save at least three to four days in processing an expense claim. That’s three to four days of gained productivity.

Improved Visibility And Transparency: Lack of transparency with manual processes is also a key concern with all enterprises. Sixty percent of companies today rely on Excel spreadsheets to manually process travel claims, where the percentage of human-induced errors is the highest. Automation will enable companies to gain better insights into aspects like exactly who is spending how much, on what, and with whom. Better visibility will lead to greater transparency.

Consistent Travel Expense Policy: As per the Nielsen study, almost half of all the companies surveyed felt that more than 25 percent of their employees do not adhere to company’s travel expense policy while applying for travel approvals. This is not only a reason for errors in the claims submitted but also makes it impossible to bring about consistency in the travel expense policy across the company. Travel expense management software will enforce company specific travel expense policy consistently throughout the process.

Apt For The Cloud: For organisations considering automating their travel expense management process there is an opportunity to leapfrog directly to the Cloud environment. Unlike other core technology solutions travel expense management applications are easier and more likely to be moved to the cloud considering these are non-core to the organisation’s operations. While Indian enterprises might be a little sceptic towards cloud when it comes to moving their core and mission critical applications, they won’t mind moving their travel expense management to the cloud. As a result, companies can effectively leverage the advantages of cost and scale that cloud offers. Cloud-based solutions will make automation of travel expense management affordable even for small and mid-sized businesses.