Today’s corporate environment with large number of employees requires several professionals travelling widely and frequently for business purposes. Travel expenses accounts for one for the largest expense categories for most companies with several enterprises spending between 10-12 percent of their annual budgets on this travel and entertainment. T&E also is possibly one of the largest areas of potential frauds and carries a high risk relating to compliance. Processing of travel expenses is a labor intensive and time consuming activity for the HR / Finance organization and the possibilities of errors are quite high.
Working with travel receipts is extremely cumbersome – locating receipts in paper format and linking them to electronic data in your Travel Expense Management software is laborious. Employees will have to keep track of receipts and then manually input the data when in office. The entire process is not only error prone but also labor intensive and painful, not only for the travelling employee but also for the processing team at the back end.
Process automation in this area is being sought by several enterprises including ability to access automation and recording of expense receipts on the go with mobile functionality. Enterprises are looking to integrate travel receipts with the travel management process and reduce the cost and burden of managing paper archives and processing transactions. They are also focusing on improving employee satisfaction through rapid reimbursements at the same time taking care of governance and compliance.
With the Travel Receipts Management (TRM) solution, receipts are automatically captured using multiple inbound channels including email, scanning, barcodes, fax, mobile device and mass import. These receipts are automatically archived as prescribed by regulatory requirements. With email integration, electronic receipts and automatically be imported and stored in personal folders tagged to employee id and travel id. Employees can take a snapshot of the receipt using their mobile device and email it along-with employee id to the travel expense desk to speed up the reimbursement process. The application is tightly integrated with your ERP and allows for automated workflows between managers, finance and HR for approvals. During an audit, such a solution allows the auditors to retrieve all e-receipts associated with a specific expense approval. There is complete audit trail and history of all e-receipts that provisions for improved regulatory compliance. The software is very intuitive and your business users can make use of it with minimal training. The solution also provides a GUI for expense administrators and a rich reporting dashboard for travel managers.
The TRM application brings with it several benefits for a large enterprise including reduced processing and storage costs, better compliance and improved decision making through data and process transparency. It links all the phases of travel management right from initial request and planning up until settlement of expenses, thereby automating your entire end to end process.