Improving Travel Expense Reimbursement Visibility

Long before Peter Drucker (or someone else) said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” there was Galileo Galilei. He knew nothing about travel expense reimbursement but plenty about mathematics. Galileo said:

“Count what is countable, measure what is measurable, and what is not measurable, make measurable.”

That’s exactly the challenge facing organizations charged with managing travel reimbursement expenses in a way that’s predictable for businesses and equitable for employees. These organizations are already asked to do a great deal: Enforce travel policies, overcome inefficient processes, and lower processing costs, even as travel and entertainment spends increase. But their greatest challenge remains poor data accuracy and visibility.

Lack of visibility into travel expense reimbursement manifests itself in several ways:

Poor expense control. Lack of visibility on spending not only leaves a business vulnerable to unauthorized and unnecessary expenses, it also hurts the organization’s ability to develop and enforce effective expense policies.

Impaired planning and budgeting. It almost goes without saying that in the absence of a detailed understanding of past spending, it is impossible to accurately predict future spending.

Added stresses on already inefficient processes. Paper-based processes are cumbersome for employees and burdensome for businesses. They not only invite fraud, they demand that company leaders make snap approval decisions that can cost businesses and employees plenty.

Aberdeen Group has noted that “organizations with visibility have greater savings opportunities, are more compliant, and have the capability to accurately predict their budget and spend, which allows for greater savings and efficiencies. This also grants these organizations strategic advantages over the competition, by simply knowing who, what, where, and how to respond to market changes in real-time situations.”

That same report detailed the value of automation and enterprise resource planning tools. “Organizations that have implemented an ERP solution not only greatly surpass those organizations with no visibility, but also surpass Best-in-Class organizations,” Aberdeen said. “This is shown with a 32% gap between organizations that have an ERP solution providing visibility across business channels versus those organizations that do not have visibility provided by an ERP system.”

Key to achieving visibility is employee adoption; and essential to adoption is ease of use. Employees today expect the same simplicity from their work applications as the ones they use in the leisure time. But with the right experience for users – and all-important mobility – these applications will deliver benefits to the business that include cost savings, convenience, compliance, scalability, fraud prevention and spending awareness.

Convenience for employees, savings for the business

SureMobile, the mobile application for both SureMileage and SureExpense, gives companies the ability to manage all of their T&E needs in a way that significantly reduces costs and greatly improves visibility.

Employees can upload receipts from mobile devices and plan, submit, and update trips from anywhere. Mobile submission means faster processing and reimbursement. That improved efficiency can save more than $1,000 a year per mobile employee.

But the even greater benefit for travel expense reimbursement is visibility. SureMobile counts what is countable and measures what is measurable.