The world of business travel is changing at an ever-accelerating pace. Disruption has quickly become the norm with sharing economy services like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb recently gaining significant ground among corporate travelers. Mobile device usage has exploded, taking the smartphone from what was a nice-to-have just a short while ago to an essential business platform for everything from communications to payments to apps for every service imaginable.
With all these advancements and innovations in technology, it’s high time companies take a hard look at their expense management practices to ensure their systems are keeping pace. Based on the changing dynamics in the business travel marketplace, here are five expense reporting features that can help your company meet the demands facing today’s accounting professionals and travelling employees alike.
Mobile Reporting
Smartphones are the perfect companion for business travelers, and usage in the U.S. has reached a point of near saturation. Its ubiquity and utility also make smartphones the ideal platform for expense reporting. Starting with smartphone-enabled receipt image capture that allows travelers to take and save digital photos of their expense receipts, to mobile report creation and manager review and approval, nothing simplifies the expense reporting process for employees like a mobile app.
Automation
Automation is at the core of many of Certify’s expense reporting features. Fundamentally, automation streamlines workflow for employees and managers, and it also simplifies backend processes for accountants and administrators. This includes automatically linking receipts with expense line items, direct credit card data feeds, and integration with ERP and HRIS systems to reduce manual data entry. Unique to our solution, Certify ReportExecutive™ also automates the expense report creation process by allowing administrators to preschedule expense report build and submit dates for the entire company.
Compliance Tools
Technology has expanded greatly the vendor and service options available to business travelers, making company T&E policy increasingly important as a tactic to control costs. Cloud-based expense management software like Certify offers a number of tools to help make travel policy compliance easy. These include features that automatically flag employee violations and notify managers of out-of-policy expenses, automatic review for duplicate expenses and receipts, expense category spending limits, mobile compliance tools, and more.
Integrated Travel
Travel booking options today are limitless, but company accountants only want one thing; that is, the best rate for any given itinerary. Two features of an integrated travel and expense management platform—lowest logical fare and pre-trip approval—make this possible. First, lowest logical fare works by automatically limiting traveler choices to only the best available air or hotel rates. Next, as the name suggests, pre-trip approval requires manager authorization before an employee books any travel arrangements. Both features can be configured to meet various policy guidelines, and as an integrated platform, travel expenses are automatically captured in the system to further streamline process.
Reporting and Analytics
It’s been said that you can’t control what you can’t see, and the same goes for company T&E expense spending. That’s why Certify offers a comprehensive suite of reporting tools to provide complete visibility into workflow and spending. Data that’s inaccessible or might require hours of number crunching in a manual expense process can be called up in seconds with Certify. And reports aren’t just limited to administrators or financial data. Employees, managers and senior executives can access an entirely new level of transparency and accountability with ease.
One more way cloud-based expense reporting can prepare your company for a brighter future: it will save you money. How much? Find out now with our online expense report calculator, it’s free to use and available anytime.
