card programme, relying instead on travellers to use their own personal cards or cash and make a subsequent expense claim. Slightly more than one in three
companies (36 per cent) said they used American Express as their corporate card of choice. AirPlus, Barclaycard and Citi corporate cards were the next most widely used.
POLICY AND PROCESS We also asked organisations for some specifics on their expense policies. One question of much interest to travellers was: at what threshold do organisations require them to supply a receipt? The results are shown in the chart (right) and reveal that the vast majority of organisations do not specify a particular limit. Of those that do stipulate one, more than 20 per cent put the limit as low as £5. As might be expected, the
recession has made organisations more vigilant in terms of expense claims, a fact borne out by the results of our survey. These reveal that one in eight companies is auditing every expense claim to make sure they comply with travel and expense (T&E) policy. However, the largest proportion of companies (29.2 per cent) say they
ONE OF THE MOST OBVIOUS TRENDS of recent years is the move of expense management to the cloud, largely driven by software-as-a-service providers such as Concur and WebExpenses. Concur is used by hundreds of blue-chip companies, including cosmetics giant Liz Claiborne and global postal company Deutsche Post. WebExpenses, meanwhile, counts British Telecom, JCB, EMI Music, Fat Face, Pernod Ricard and Amazon subsidiary The Book Depository among its customers. Even the public sector is getting in on the idea. The UK government recently launched its G-Cloud online store (called Cloud Store) for various categories of
software, and one of the first products available was cloud- based expense management software from Software Europe. Honister Capital Group is one
company using cloud expense technology. Here, Honister’s cost accountant, Ken Wotherspoon, answers questions about its use.
How easy was it to integrate the technology? “We chose WebExpenses because the system is so clear and easy to use. With businesses like Burns- Anderson, Willis Owen and Sage Financial Services in our portfolio, we are now one of Britain’s biggest independent financial advisory groups. Consequently, it was essential that we found