Flexible Travel and Expense Management Solution

InterplX Technologies

On average, Aberdeen Research found that travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses account for between 8% and 10% of total operating expenses. The actual amount can range from $50,000 to more than $100 million a year for some of the larger corporations. In your opinion what are the most daunting challenges companies face in efficiently managing this expense category?
The key word here is efficiently. Efficiently managing T&E is about finding balance and using common sense. You need to balance the organization’s need for control and compliance with the employee’s need for fast and easy. Control and compliance ensure maximal ROI on T&E spend and fast and easy ensure happy employees and reduced processing costs (hence efficiency). There is a lot of hype in the T&E management space about new technologies: one-click expense reporting, no receipt expense reporting, integration with this system or that. Layering in more technology just for technology’s sake is neither fast nor easy and does not aid in control or compliance. That is where common sense comes in. The challenge is in weeding through the hype to find the right T&E management solution and process for your organization.

Let’s take travel booking, for example. We all know that it can be fast and easy to book a round trip airline ticket online. And you can add hotel and car rental fairly easily too. What you just did is actually two types of transactions: a purchase (airline ticket) and a reservation (hotel and rental car). And a good online corporate booking tool will ensure users follow company policies and business rules when booking travel. Fast and easy with control and compliance. Print out your airline receipt and reservation data and you are good to go.

Once on the road, you get a call. Your meeting in Chicago has been cancelled. You need to come home a day earlier. You cancel the Chicago hotel and rental car, re-do you airline ticket, paying a change fee at the ticket counter and fly home. Now, you sit down to do your expense report. Fortunately, all your expenses were paid for with your corporate card, so the charges can be pre-populated right into your expense report. So far, so good.

But wait! Your company wants you to reconcile your reservation data into your expense report too. Now you have to match up the hotel reservation to the corporate card charge, you have to explain why you didn’t stay at the hotel in Chicago, why your car rental in Chicago was cancelled, and why your airfare isn’t the same as the booked amount. Suddenly fast and easy expense reporting isn’t. In fact the pain of doing your expense report is becoming kidney stone-esque! And none of this extra work does anything to encourage compliance or control. It is being done after the expense has been incurred.

Common sense says make the expense process fast and easy, yet complete. The data needed is available from the corporate card. No need to layer in reservation data to complicate things. Rewind to the point of doing your expense report above: You sit down to do your expense report. Your corporate card charges are available in your web-based expense system. You simply add some required data and your out-of-pocket expenses, attach your scanned receipts and hit the submit button. No need to explain what didn’t happen. No extra layers of integration needed. That is fast and easy.

Your expense system has all the business rules built right in to ensure policies are clear, understood and followed. Managers see exceptions and receipt images when they are reviewing expense reports so they will make better approval decisions. Data is fed right from the expense system into your General Ledger system, minimizing processing costs. And all the records are archived automatically for long-term storage. Fast, easy and best of all efficient (translation: low cost).

So the short answer to your question is: common sense will help overcome the daunting challenge of managing this large, distributed, high-transaction expense category without spending more than you need to on the process.

What is the value of a travel and expense management solution that offers both front and back-office solutions?
First of all, let’s define front and back-office. Front office expense management is the process of your end-user completing and submitting their expense report. It includes the attachment of receipts and supporting documentation and the routing of the expense through the approval chain. All expense management companies offer similar features and functions to accomplish this process.

The back-office involves the rest of the process. The main reason end-users complete expense reports is to get their money back and to get their corporate card bill paid. So payment processing, to both the employee and the corporate card, is a key step. And compliance managers want to make sure there is an audit step in the process. This audit step needs to ensure employees and managers are doing their jobs properly. It needs to include the resolution of audit exceptions. It needs to be a common sense, closed loop process that is efficient, consistent and timely. And finally, the data and documentation must be archived for up to 7 years to support IRS and internal records management requirements. The true value of a total front to back solution is that you are not left with half a solution; you are not left to do the “heavy lifting” of the process. You gain reliability, cost-efficiency, and SOX compliance by outsourcing the entire process.

What does it mean to have a flexible travel management solution? What are its benefits?
Flexibility means a solution that is adaptable to your individual business needs. No two companies are alike. Their business needs and policies are unique. So expense management solutions need to be flexible to meet the unique needs of each client. However, efficiency dictates that software cannot be all things to all people. So flexibility in the expense management space is a matter of degree. Too much flexibility is expensive to develop and support. Too little flexibility means a system that meets very few business’ needs. I think the ideal balance between flexibility and efficient operation is the goal of all providers and a balance that is the key differentiator for InterplX Expense Management.

How does Interplx enable their clients to achieve control, performance and reliability and what are its advantages?
InterplX Expense Management has a fourteen-year history of providing highly flexible solutions at a very low cost to companies large and small. Our web-based expense reporting system is built on a multi-tenant architecture, meaning all clients operate on the current, single code base. This enables us to maintain the lowest cost of support and delivery in the industry. In addition, there is no issue with release management. Yet the system is designed to allow each client to set parameters to define their business rules and policies. In effect we configure the system to look like it was designed for each client.

Secondly, we support each client with a high level of service. Our clients all tell us the thing that sets us apart is that we listen and respond to them. In the end, we believe our industry is a service industry, not a technology industry. We believe technology is an enabler, but service is what ensures customer delight. Our proprietary technologies enable us to be efficient and maintain the lowest pricing in the industry, but our service is what makes our clients sing our praises.

Thirdly, our management team averages over 20 years in the business. You can’t beat experience when it is time to develop and deliver solutions. Our experience tells us to keep it simple and to maintain low overhead. The combination of experience and common sense is evident in the speed and efficiency with which our solutions are implemented. And while no one likes doing expense reports, our clients’ users tell us our expense management system is fast and easy; painless. In the end, if the users are happy, senior management will be happy. Only an experienced company can make a full-featured, fully controlled yet flexible system seem so simple and easy to use that training is almost not needed. And only InterplX can bring that much experience to the table.

Finally, at the end of the day, performance is what matters most. Do you deliver consistently, day in and day out? We have undergone a SAS 70 Type II audit for each of the past five years. During those years we have had flawless processing of billions of dollars in employee expense transactions. In all cases our auditors have given us a clean report with no qualifications. This ensures our clients of our reliability, security, accuracy and compliance with SOX regulations. What this means is that when you submit your expense report, once it is approved you can count on the money being in your account within two days. It means when your SOX auditors ask about your expense process, you can give them a complete SAS audit, already done for them. It means when your CFO asks for information about your company’s cell-phone expenses, you can shoot him or her a report in a matter of minutes.

I believe our clients will tell you that we offer the highest level of service and flexibility at the lowest total cost of ownership in the space: the true definition of value.