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End-to-end claims fly.

Article Excerpt
Consultants and vendors are cautioning corporate expense managers to carefully examine the disparate definitions travel and entertainment expense vendors use in making claims that they can deliver end-to-end travel expense reporting. Some in the industry question whether simply integrating booking and expense reporting alone is enough to justify adopting such a tool.

By strictest definition, the end-to-end T&E expense solution remains an elusive and lofty goal, said Bob Langsfeld, a consultant with the Incline Village, Nev.-based Corporate Solutions Group. The Holy Grail of corporate travel automation would cover every step from pre-trip authorization, to cost determination, availability and inventory searches, ticket fulfillment, the actual trip and such elements within it as card use, expense reporting, financial review and reimbursement and ending with all data reaching a single database, he said.

"An end-to-end solution would and should be all of the above mad should have a seamless integration of data flow," Langsfeld said. "The acid test would be: Does the data from all the different sources find their way into the process without human intervention? And do they populate the different documents throughout the process?"

Although no one--at least to the knowledge of Langsfeld and other industry watchers--has accomplished...

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