launched an integrated payment solution with HRS where corporate customers can automatically generate a virtual credit card from their VPayment account to pay for their hotel accommodation, removing the need for them to deal with paper invoices. Gillies says: “Corporate travellers,
particularly the tech-savvy ‘millennial’ generation [generally seen as aged 20-35 years], are increasingly aligning their busi- ness and leisure expectations, and as they see apps and mobile payments replace traditional plastic cards in their personal lives, they are beginning to expect the same hi-tech, hassle-free ways to pay when they are travelling for business.”
What many travellers want, particularly millennials, is payment to be a seamless process
What many travellers want, par- ticularly millennials, is payment to be a seamless process – imagine waving your phone over a reader in a restaurant, payment being taken from a virtual card stored on it and
GETTING RESULTS
IF YOU THINK MANAGING A FOOTBALL TEAM IS HARD WORK, spare a though for the people who have to manage a club’s travel and expenses. Your team is 2-0 down in a key FA Cup match and the journey home on the team bus looks like being a quiet affair. Then a few moments of magic on the pitch and you’re 3-2 up at the final whistle. Suddenly there is a trip up north in two weeks’ time to organise and all the hotels are fully booked. It’s a funny old game, that’s for sure. There are also a lot more people involved than the 11 men on the pitch. Take Fulham FC, for example. As well as the squad, the club has almost 200 permanent employees and anything up to 600 casual staff for match days. Ben Haworth is the man who makes sure that the finances run smoothly behind the scenes. Haworth, Fulham’s financial controller, leads a team of five and manages statutory accounting, the purchase and sales ledgers,
88 BBT SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015
and the financial relationships with the Football League and UEFA, as well as the expenses of the club’s staff.
Fulham uses combination of corporate Barclaycards and Concur expense management to handle the mileage, airfares and hotels for scouts, coaches and medical staff. Many travel bookings go through Egencia and there are also group bookings for the players. But many travel bookings are still made individually and claimed back through expenses. The decision to automate the expense process came after Haworth and his team had just finished implementing a purchase ledger invoice approval system and he was looking at other ways to introduce paperless solutions into the workflow. On the same day in November, both he and his boss were listening to the radio on the way to work and heard the same advert for Concur; both came to the office convinced that might be something that would be good to look at to do just that.
Haworth says that a vital point in choosing an automated expense system was finding a solution that worked for “football people and not admin people”. The club’s talent scouts were a particular focus, as they can be out on the road for most of the year. The potential for receipts to get lost and for a backlog to build up was considerable. Haworth was also looking for a system that could standardise claims. Previously, some paper claims had suffered from poor handwriting, scant detail and numbers not adding up. The new system meant that figures were calculated automatically and users could select reason codes from a dropdown list. One of the key features of Concur that appealed to Haworth was the ability to image receipts. “Once that image is captured, you can throw the receipt away and there is far less excuse now for it going missing,” he says. Haworth and two others in his team received training from Concur, and these then trained
one nominated person in each department who would be the frontline for queries from users, with anything more difficult escalated to Haworth and his team. Now, they are only handling a couple of queries each month.
As well as the user
experience, the club is also seeing financial benefits from being able to recover VAT on mileage claims more accurately. “We estimate that the additional VAT we are recovering is covering half the monthly cost of the system,” says Haworth. The Concur system is also making it easier to drill down into the management accounts and see better quality data. Haworth was pleasantly surprised by the speed of implementation: the time from signing the contract to the first claim being processed was just ten weeks. With the 2015/16 season just starting, Fulham will be hoping that a clutch of new signings in the summer transfer window will bring as good results on the field as the new expenses system has been off it.
BUYINGBUSINESSTRAVEL.COM
having the whole thing flow through to your expense claim. In reality that is not far away. The
launch of Apple Pay will be a big driver of changing behaviour. In the US, Concur is already plugged into the back-end systems of coffee chain Starbucks – the venue for more out-of-office business meetings than any other, according to Concur. It also offers similar functionality with Uber. In a world where distribution of travel
and related services is becoming more fragmented, focusing on the user to encourage them to be more compliant with policy by offering benefits such as faster payment of expenses makes a good deal of sense.
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