THE FUTURE IS PAPERLESS
The ultimate goal for expense management systems is a fully-automated, touchless process
M
ost business travellers know the pain of coming back to the office with a fistful of paper receipts and then having to find
time to go through it all – often weeks or months after the trip, amid fears of not getting reimbursed at all because they have put off the process for such a lengthy period that a submission deadline is looming. And that doesn’t begin to account for the
lost productivity caused by the time these employees spend doing expenses – for example, Visa Europe’s head of commercial large- and mid-markets, David Harrison, says one client estimated that every staff member spent about one hour per month manually doing their expenses. Talk to expense management specialists such as Concur, Traveldoo and HRG’s new Fraedom brand, and they shine a light on a new way of dealing with expenses, where receipts are scanned using travellers’ mobile devices and expense reports are written and submitted automatically, with virtually no input necessary from the employee once they return to the office.
ONLINE TOOLS
This kind of automation is already becom- ing the norm for many larger organisa- tions, due to the proliferation of online tools and apps designed to take the pain out of compiling expense reports. Smaller firms should also increasingly benefit from these innovations, as this market is being vigorously targeted by the likes of Concur and Fraedom. David Vine, Concur’s managing director
of UK small businesses, says: “Getting the expense reports to write themselves – that
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remains a vision for us. It’s still a long-term goal and there are difficulties, such as how to itemise an entire hotel bill with its multiple line items.” He adds that embracing mobile technology and cloud-based systems is helping to increase the level of automation, and fuelling the move away from offline, manual processes, such as travellers having to fill in Excel spreadsheets after the trip. Concur’s Expense It software, which was launched in the UK last year, scans and analyses receipts and tries to match them with the correct credit card line items. “It reads the receipt and populates as
many fields as it can – such as the time, date and amount,” says Vine. “It does the best it can, and it’s evolving all the time as it analyses more receipts and understands the different types of receipts. At the moment, it’s very good for simple travel tickets, such as trains and the Underground.” Nabih El Aroussi, CEO of Traveldoo, adds that the long-term aim is to create a system where travellers’ expenses are “generated, approved and paid for without you having to enter any data”. He says: “The ultimate objective is to make it very simple for the traveller, travel manager and finance director. You do your business trip and the expense report is filled in without you having to do anything.” Paris-based Traveldoo, which was pur- chased by Egencia in 2011, also sees mobile technology as the way to increase automa- tion and reduce the manual inputting of expenses data by travellers – which inevitably leads to mistakes. This has led to the creation of Traveldoo’s new app, which is the first to combine geolocation technology with voice recognition capabilities and digital receipts.
“When the waiter gives you the bill
in the restaurant, you can open the app and – because it knows your location – it will bring up restaurants in the area,” says El Aroussi. “You select the right one, and the app will automatically enter all of the restaurant’s details. It can also suggest what type of expense it is, so if it’s 2pm, the app will suggest the expense is a lunch. You then just have to use your mobile device to scan your receipt at the end of the meal. Finally, you can use voice recognition to say what the final bill comes to. Then, you’re done and you have created the expense report without writing anything down.” But what about business travellers’ fears of being effectively tracked during every step of their trip and the potential issues this raises? “You have to enable geoloca- tion on the app – we don’t track all your moves but we believe geolocation is useful,” says El Aroussi. “We respect data privacy and the user decides whether to press a button to give their geolocation when they open the app.”
OFFERING OF CHOICE One of the most significant changes in the expenses management field over the last year has been SAP’s purchase of Concur, which was finalised in late 2014. SAP currently operates its own travel and ex- penses (T&E) platform for clients, which the company will continue to support through to the end of current contract periods. “It can only be good news for our customers,” says Concur’s Vine. “We will keep doing what we’re doing and we’re not changing our core technologies. We are focused on innovation, where we can make
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