Challenges in the Travel and Expense Management Process
Collecting paper receipts, scanning, attaching
Desktop and Manual processes for Travel and Expense management involving collecting piles of receipts, scanning, attaching requisitions, invoices and poorly managed travel expenses provides little or no ability for spend policy enforcement. The inefficiency in manual and desktop processes leads to many more challenges like employees over spending, lack of spend visibility creating difficulty in consolidating and negotiating better pricing with vendors and too much time in approvals. Delayed desktop expense report processing and approvals making it difficult to accrue liability and report on a multitude of performance indicators.
Issues with enforcing travel policies
Card issuer compliance is often high on the agenda, non-compliance could result in fines and damage to both bottom line and the reputation of the company. Companies are finding innovative ways to ensure expense reports are filed in a timely manner and adhere to travel policy compliances. However, most employees make travel and expense decisions without having the most up to date and accurate information available to them in real-time to make in-policy and out of policy travel expense decisions.
Delayed submission of expense reports
Travel and expense staff and managers have to often chase down employees and ask for the timely submission of their travel and expense reports. Delayed Submission of a travel and expense report, along with attaching scanned copies of the receipts after finishing their business travel delays the final approval of travel expenses incurred. The increase in overall processing time for expense report increases your cost per employee for managing travel and expenses and decreases productivity of your accounts payable teams, resulting in increased cost per travel and expense report processed.
Employee productivity loss
Desktop expense management system slows down business processes and creates elongated approval process and reimbursement timeline. Regular late submission of expense reports, sometimes weeks or even months late, due to unavailability of mobile tools decreases employee productivity.
Go Mobile and get rid of paper receipts and enter SAP Travel and Expense Reports on the Fly, as you fly
A mobile travel and expense management solution can dramatically improve employee productivity with features such as on the go expense receipt capture, timely submission of expense reports and ensuring travel and expense purchases are made within policy by verifying the expense against company policy in real time. Mobile Travel and Expense management is the key for controlling and reducing operating expenses, eliminating untimely submissions of expense reports and reduces overall cost per travel and expense report. Using Mobile solution like mTravel from Innovapptive, employees in businesses in every sector can now avoid all of those tasks.
Features and Functionality of the mTravel Solution.
Innovapptive’s mTravel mobile solution for managing Travel expenses, brings a level of flexibility for employees to easily capture, track, and manage travel expense reports on-the-go. Recent Aberdeen Group research shows that mobile-enabled expense programs:
- Increase compliance by 10%
- Reduce time to submit and approve reports by 28%
- Reduce processing costs by 40%
mTravel makes it easy to achieve the same results. Users can capture transaction data at the time they incur an expense. Cash expenses (such as tips or taxi fares) can be added quickly to an expense report, receipt images can be captured with the phone’s camera and credit card charges are automatically available in the mobile application for reporting.
With the mTravel Mobile Solution, businesses can:
- Keep control – travel content is determined by your policies
- Save time – convenient access speeds up submissions and approvals
- Improve accuracy – with receipt images and on-the-spot reporting
- Satisfy travelers – mobile access makes travel much easier
