Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | B | Business Travel News

Corps. automate expense, payment.

Article Excerpt
Three expense managers and a travel buyer this month discussed expense reporting processes, automated reporting tools and integration between payment systems, employee expense management and travel with BTN editors. Participants were Larry Bolsch, director of expense processing [or the Americas region for Credit Suisse First Boston; Nacion Colly-Triplett, T&E accounting manager for Georgia-Pacific; Robert Mendence, finance manager, and Suzen Moye, senior travel manager, both with Applera.

BTN: What efficiencies has expense reporting automation helped you achieve?

Nacion Colly-Triplett: Automation improved our turnaround time in processing alone because the paper trail has been eliminated. Receipts aren't stuck at a manager's desk before going to a check-request process. When we had a paper-based system, it would take up to 12 days to process an expense report. Today, with the automated process, it's less than one day. Because we have the electronic pre-populated data and the automated workflow, an employee can file an expense report and within 10 minutes the manager can approve and load it to the database for payment. It's sped up the time required to process. Automation also helped to reduce headcount. We went from 15 full-time employees when we were fully manual to six. You still need auditors, you still need your administrator. Automation also has helped improve customer satisfaction, compliance and mandate issues. It's been a benefit to the company and a benefit to our customers. It's the only system used enterprise-wide, by every traveler throughout the country. We take great pride in that.

Robert Mendence: There's been a lot of improvement from automation. Some, never in our wildest dreams did we think we'd come to. When we rolled it out, I asked for 30 field-based employees to be part of the beta test group and about another 30 from office locations. I ended up with about 120 field people, because they told a friend who told a friend and so forth. They started telling us what rules were good. After a week, they wanted to use it right away. People who worked out of their house or in the field told me they used to wait up to eight weeks before they were reimbursed. They saw that this speeds it up. Needless to say, very rarely did we achieve a rebate with our previous system. Now, our rebates are on target because of this automation. We have the credit card data prepopulated. We see all the charges. Our policy is to submit for processing within three weeks of the...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!