EXPENSE MANAGEMENT
DAN FITZGERALD Chief product officer, Traveldoo
RACHEL VAN DER MERWE Director, product marketing, SAP Concur
ALI HUSSAIN Chief innovation & technology officer, ATPI Group
USING EXPENSE DATA CAN OPEN UP A NUMBER OF NEW OPPORTUNITIES BY LOOKING AT THE TOTAL COST OF A TRIP
SAP Concur conducted research with 1,100 employees responsible for signing off mileage expenses across the UK, France, Finland, Germany and Sweden. Its research found 56 per cent of mileage claims were rarely or never being checked by managers.
SAP Concur is also continuing to work directly with big-name travel suppliers, such as ride-hailing giant Uber and major airlines, including British Airways, to capture transactions completed outside preferred booking channels. In May, BA integrated its website with SAP Concur’s Triplink itinerary service allowing data from bookings made by business travellers through
ba.com to be captured. The traveller making this direct booking automatically gets access to any negotiated corporate discounts when they link their BA Executive Club and Concur accounts. Van der Merwe says: “The booking data is synced automatically to Concur, so it creates a line item and gives the client early visibility of spending as well as improving duty-of-care because they know the traveller has booked a flight outside the corporate booking tool.”
WAKING UP
The development of more sophisticated tools should make life easier for both travellers and buyers with the ability to pick up data from bookings made outside the preferred booking platforms. But where do TMCs fit into this evolving expenses landscape?
buyingbusinesstravel.com
Consultant Raj Suchdave, managing partner of Black Box Partnerships, says TMCs have “woken up” to the importance of using expense data to create “a smarter picture of a journey”. “The greater the data, the more collective view you can get of travel patterns and how that impacts the cost of travel,” he says. “You need to pull together all these data sources – travel, expense and profile data. It’s not just about looking at the cost of air tickets or train fares. “You may have already squeezed out all the savings you can from a travel programme, but using expense data can open up a number of new opportunities by looking at the total cost of a trip.” Ali Hussain, ATPI Group’s chief innovation and technology officer, agrees analysing total trip cost for clients is a crucial part of a TMC’s role.
“By analysing in one place under one trip, business owners, procurement and finance managers are able to get a full view,” he adds. “If a trip is attached to a sales conference they are then in a more qualified position to analyse the ROI of that conference based on the cost of travel.” Nick Ludlow, general manager, EMEA, at Chrome River Technologies, adds expense management is not just about “finding ways to keep cutting business travel spend”. “Forward-thinking companies are more
often looking at how they can make travel spend work harder to drive value,” he says. “We’re focused on helping companies analyse and easily visualise data by linking Chrome River with their own CRM system.
2018 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 99 “This allows travellers to allocate their
spend to specific prospects or accounts, so sales and finance teams can then analyse them to determine which types of spend have the greatest impact on revenue generation.”
THE NEXT STEPS With so much talk about new technology – particularly around subjects such as artificial intelligence and machine learning – what’s the next development for the expense management industry? Expense apps are constantly learning to scan and read paper-based receipts more accurately, thus reducing the number of corrections business travellers have to make manually. Lydie Charpin, global head of
corporation solutions at Amadeus, says its T&E platform uses optical character recognition (OCR) to read receipts while machine learning currently enables it to
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154
