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BTN's 4th Annual Expense Manager Survey: Make Further Inroads.

Article Excerpt
Paper and spreadsheets still dominate as the expense reporting methods of choice for buyers in Business Travel News' fourth annual Expense Manager Survey, but BTN's research also indicates that more options from expense vendors along with the need for more oversight to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements have eroded that dominance and made automated expense reporting more common in small and midmarket companies. While integrating expense systems with other aspects of the supply chain remains largely the exception rather than the rule, expense managers are showing a desire to do so.

Based on BTN's survey of 168 expense managers, 30 percent use systems purchased from outside vendors, and the remaining 70 percent use in-house systems. In terms of the ratio, however, nearly twice as many respondents use outside vendors for their expense reporting tool compared with BTN's first Expense Manager Survey in 2004, when only 17 percent were doing so.

Survey respondents largely were from small and midmarket companies with less than $12 million in annual U.S. booked air spending, and consultants said outside expense vendor penetration among large-market buyers is much higher. David Hillman, principal of Deerfield, Ill.-based Consulting Strategies, said smaller-market expense managers are seeing the success of larger companies with expense automation, and that success now is trickling down to them. Vendors also are more aggressively targeting small and midmarket expense managers, and implementation has become more affordable.

"The price for third-party expense management software has come down significantly over the years, particularly for smaller users," Hillman said. "It used to be that companies...

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