Friday, May 29, 2015

Out of Control T&E Expenses: Taming Your T&E Beast

In my recent blog Seven Flags Your T&E Expenses are Out of Control, I identified 7 red flags that may indicate T&E expense management is not getting its due at your company. In this blog, I will offer specific advice regarding how to address these T&E problem areas.

Here are the tips that CFOs can use to take back control of their company’s T&E expenses: 1. Review your company’s T&E policies; if you do not have them, you need to create them

Ensure policies are consistent with your company’s current and future travel needs, incentivize the use of technology available to automate T&E expense report requests to reimbursement, and are designed to mitigate the burden involved in being reimbursed on your travelers and those who manage them Ensure policies include input from key travel groups Ensure policies do not inhibit the timeliness of expense report submission and/or reimbursement

2. Improve the travel policy IQ of your employees Review the policy with all travelers on an annual basis Make sure they understand the actions under their control which can impact the timely reimbursement of expense reports Explain how effective T&E management benefits the company, i.e., the company has no incentive to make the process difficult for them; there are costs to inefficient T&E processes and unpredictability of T&E related expenses Ask travelers what you can do to make things easier for them (and do it) 3. Automate key components of T&E expense management

Auto-fill (parsing) technology: Extracts receipt and expense data from receipts, eliminating manual entry Auto-created expense reports: Built by technology to create expense report matching receipt images to expense data Direct feeds: Automated feeds sync data with accounting, HR, and corporate credit cards to eliminate manual data entry between systems Automated approval workflows: Managers are instantly notified of electronic reports pending approval, decreasing expense report lifecycle and reimbursement times Read more HERE!.

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