RECEIPTS AND RECONCILIATION The treatment of receipts is the big battleground for expense manage- ment systems. American Express has integrated with Concur’s Expense It app in the US and Australia to help with this, for example.
“The app notifies American Express
card members, in near real-time, that they have made a transaction with their corpo- rate card and encourages them to capture the receipt with a photo at the point of sale, vastly simplifying the reconciliation process when they return to the office,” says Amex’s Gillies. For Traveldoo, it is the automation of
several previously manual tasks that has brought the greatest user benefit. “The way it works is through a combination of multiple technologies,” says Mindren. The mobile app uses geolocation to suggest the names of businesses around you that are likely to be the source of the expense. “If you are in a restaurant, we then use the time of day to suggest whether it is breakfast, lunch or dinner,” he says. “You can use voice recognition to tell the app the amount you’ve paid, and photograph the receipt and add it to your expense report. It means you’ve been able to
“Mobile technology has provided expense
programme managers with valuable contextual information and visibility into secondary expenses”
submit your new expense without having to manually enter any data.” Technology is also helping improve compliance and reduce costs, according to Amex. “Mobile technology has provided expense programme managers with valu- able contextual information and visibility into secondary expenses that helps them to manage compliance remotely,” says Gillies. “Having the power to communicate with employees at every step of the trip rather than just before departure allows them to influence micro-purchases such
as wifi or meals, which for large organisa- tions can amount to significant savings,” he says. “For example, companies can leverage GPS-based tools to provide just-in-time recommendations such as programme-approved restaurants, and push out real-time alerts to flag pre- negotiated rates with suppliers or com- plimentary services for employees. They can also configure SMS tools to respond to keyword inquiries such as ‘taxi’, ‘hotel’ and ‘restaurant’ with automated in-policy recommendations.”
RAPID REACTION The move towards ‘software-as-a-service’ and cloud-based technology, and away from applications downloaded to in- dividual desktops, has seen a change in the way new features are rolled out. Many companies, including Traveldoo, use so-called ‘agile’ development, which focuses on rapid reaction to change and fast deployment of new features. Concur’s Vine says the company’s
updates to its various tools are incremen- tal and ongoing. “You are always using the latest version of the software,” he says. Concur launched a new user interface in October 2014, and used beta testing to fine-tune the new release. “We put it out there and worked on it until we were happy,” says Vine. “We then did an opt-in roll-out to other customers, giving them the option to adopt early but also giving them a backstop date by which they would have to move across.” Vine says the new user interface has converted into a 5-15 per cent time saving for users. One thing that singles expenses out
from other applications of technology is that providers do not seek to improve the user experience purely to increase adoption. Improving the user experience of an online booking tool can get more people to use it; a company could imple- ment an expense tool that offers the user a dreadful experience but they would still be compelled to use it because they would know that they would not get reimbursed if they did not.
HOTEL BILLBACK One example where user experience is triumphing in the expenses sector is in hotel billback. Amex, for instance, has
86 BBT SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
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