White Paper Travel & Expense One Touch Business Travel Na
1. Strategies for Success – The White Paper Series from Concur
One Touch Business Travel and
the End of the Expense Report
Amplifying The Value of Automation
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2. Strategies for Success – The White Paper Series from Concur
Executive Overview
Historically, organizations haven’t placed much emphasis on streamlining processes
that were not core to their businesses. Even with the pressure of regulatory compliance
and the need to cut costs across the business, the approach many organizations have
taken with internal processes – including the management of corporate travel and the
expense reporting process – has either been “it doesn’t seem broken, so why fix it?”
or “it’s not broken too badly, so we’ll continue to live with it the way it is”. Driven by
the absence of a technology solution that unifies all aspects of corporate travel and
expense management, along with a lack of understanding of the benefits to addressing
these two processes holistically, organizations continue to spend an inordinate amount
of time and money managing the procurement of travel and the reimbursement of
expenses as two separate processes.
Despite the fact that billions of dollars per year are spent on business travel and
entertainment (T&E) by employees on behalf of their organizations, many companies
are still not maximizing the value of that spend because they’re relying on multiple
processes and solutions to manage their T&E spend – an area that for many is the
second largest controllable cost after payroll. Yet, the logical result of every employee
business trip is the submission of an expense report, which begs the question, “why are
these two processes still viewed as discrete functions by most organizations?”
T&E expenses
Some forward-thinking companies are taking a new view of travel and expense
management and are taking steps to unite these processes. And some T&E industry account for nearly
suppliers are doing their part to ensure that they develop automated solutions
that meet the needs of employees involved with all parts of the travel and expense 10 percent of an
management process – from travel procurement to expense reimbursement.
Additionally, with the growing trend of on-demand services, companies of all sizes organization’s
are now able to automate the entire travel and expense management process without
having to spend significant dollars or make material changes to their day-to-day T&E total operating
business processes.
These same forward-thinking companies are leveraging the power of automated expenses.1
solutions to help unite the corporate travel and expense management processes.
This enables them to achieve significantly greater savings and business process
efficiencies than by automating each process discretely. Additionally, by streamlining
and automating the entire travel and expense management process, companies can
further improve employee satisfaction by providing their travelers with greater choice,
freedom, convenience and value. Finally, with a single, unified, automated solution,
companies can take greater control over, and further enhance, their visibility into T&E
spend so that they can make smarter business decisions and ensure compliance.
Understanding The Opportunity
Automated solutions have produced fruitful results for many of the companies that
have recognized the need to streamline business processes, increase control and
reduce costs. For example, the following paragraphs, outline how companies have used
automation to improve the operations of their business and reduce their T&E spend
through efficiency gains and cost reductions.
Automating The Travel Management Process
Lower Travel Costs: Procuring travel online can cost significantly less than using a
traditional travel agency for air, hotel, and car reservations. Best-in-class companies
achieve 40 percent lower online booking costs than their competitors.2 Sophisticated
online booking tools maximize the benefits of free market competition by presenting
a complete view of all of the travel content available to the consumer, including
negotiated and Internet only rates.
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3. Strategies for Success – The White Paper Series from Concur
Lower Transaction Costs: A wide variety of options creates more flexibility and
convenience for the traveler, instilling confidence that the online booking tool is
presenting a complete view of the available travel options and increasing the likelihood
that the traveler will choose a rate within the guidelines of their corporate travel
program. In addition to these hard dollar savings and increases in convenience, online
bookings also result in lower transaction fees. With the need for human intervention
to complete a reservation dramatically reduced, recent studies show that the
transaction cost for an online-booked reservation was lower than an agency-assisted
reservation. According to Aberdeen Group, online booking solutions present a great
opportunity for savings with transaction costs significantly lower than booking by
phone with an agent.3
Increased Corporate Control and Policy Compliance: Travel managers work hard to
negotiate rates and set travel policies that maximize their organization’s travel spend.
But if they lack a way to enforce these pre-negotiated rates and pre-determined
policies, their efforts are in vain. Automated travel management tools feature robust A company
rules engines and automated workflow and approval mechanisms to help ensure
that the policies and controls in place will be properly enforced. Improvements to processing
compliance can amount to as much as 60 percent of total savings for T&E.4 Enhanced
visibility into actual spend also gives travel managers increased control while reducing 5,000 expense
the risk of out-of policy behavior from their constituents.
Actionable Information: Today’s corporate travel management solutions provide
reports a
complete, real-time, actionable information through Web-based reporting portals.
This data can be analyzed and synthesized into forecasting and benchmarking
month can save
information to help drive smarter business decisions and improve new and existing
vendor negotiations. In comparison, a non-automated travel program typically only
approximately
produces post-event reporting which is, by definition, reactionary in nature and of less
value to the organization. Leveraging actual booking and itinerary information in
$960,000 in
real-time brings real additional value to the organization.
one year with
Productivity Savings: With an automated program, travelers spend less time
completing their travel plans. For example, if travelers feel confident that they will automated
receive a convenient, low-cost travel option within their corporate travel program,
they will no longer spend time searching other locations for travel content. expense
Sophisticated online booking tools also have the ability to proactively provide timely
information to travelers and travel managers, keeping them up to date on the most reporting.7
current travel information that could affect their upcoming travel plans. Finally,
advanced automated booking tools, unlike their traditional counterparts, are able to
create trip templates, provide electronic maps, produce smart reminders, and integrate
to personal digital assistants, all of which provide additional value to travelers, while
increasing productivity.
Automating The Expense Reporting Process
Lower Processing Costs: A company processing 5,000 expense reports a month
can save approximately $960,000 in one year with automated expense reporting.5
Automating this process can – depending on the size of the organization – drive that
cost as low as $4 per report. Additionally, sophisticated expense reporting solutions
virtually eliminate the cost of handling and processing paper. For example, electronic
document imaging and cataloguing of receipts and expense items eliminates the
need for storage, postage and administrative handling while allowing for easy spot-
checking during audits. Automated solutions are also relatively easy to integrate with
corporate card programs, capturing actual expense information directly from the card
provider via automatic data feeds, reducing the need to enter or re-key expense data
and reducing the costs associated with human error. Finally, with built-in payment
authorization and processing, these solutions dovetail nicely with most organizations’
payroll and ERP systems for efficient reconciliation.
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4. Strategies for Success – The White Paper Series from Concur
Increased Corporate Control and Policy Compliance: Companies that use automated
approval and workflow mechanisms to enforce expense management policies pay less
for goods and services and retain more control over their corporate expense programs.
Automation reduces the risk of processing expense reports containing errors or even
fraud. By helping companies actively manage their employee spend, these safeguards
ensure that organizations remain in good standing with the federally mandated
compliance acts associated with corporate governance.
Actionable Information: Reporting and statistical analysis of policy, vendor, treasury
activity and allocations is critical to managing the expense process. With an automated
expense management solution – complete with real-time business intelligence data –
companies ensure that the right information is readily accessible to simplify the audit
process and prevent fraud.
Productivity Savings: The time to complete an expense report manually is about 28
minutes, while completing an expense report electronically takes about 15 minutes – By tying travel
twice as fast.6 This enables employees to spend more time on high-value tasks that
drive more top-line revenue to the company. For example, if an organization has a 100 and expense
person sales team and each sales representative is able to spend one additional hour
per week selling vs. filling out expense reports, that’s the equivalent to adding two together, could
and a half more salespeople without actually hiring any additional staff! And that’s in
addition to the positive effects that a streamlined, more user-friendly process has on such a solution
the staff as a whole.
It’s clear that many organizations have greatly benefited by simply automating two actually be
discrete, but interrelated processes. However, in today’s mobile and global economy,
the lines are quickly blurring between travel and expense. The next big step that smart enough
progressive companies are beginning to undertake is uniting the travel and expense
processes into a single process that considers all elements of T&E – from travel to automatically
procurement to expense reimbursement.
fill out an
The Synergistic Effects of a Unified T&E Process
Travel is an integral part of doing business. When an employee takes a business- expense report
related trip, the reporting of T&E expenses inevitably follows. So why aren’t these
two processes linked together in a strategic way? What would be the result if an with virtually
organization were to streamline the entire process from pre-trip planning through to
reimbursement and analysis of spend data? And what if this streamlined process went no human
even a step further and shattered the traditional notion of an expense report? With
technology powerful enough, could a process be developed to automatically gather intervention?
and reconcile electronic data generated during the course of business travel, match
that with itinerary data captured during the booking process, ushering in an era of one
touch business travel?
With the cost of business travel rapidly increasing, the answers to these questions
are literally worth billions of dollars per year. Combining these two processes –
corporate travel management and expense report automation – is now one of the
largest opportunities organizations of all sizes have to drive real bottom-line savings.
Progressive companies are recognizing that the deployment of an integrated, end-to-
end travel and expense management solution to automate and control travel booking
and expense reporting is now a strategic initiative. Fiscally aggressive companies are
seeking ways to reduce operating overhead, simplify the process and take control to
drive savings to their bottom line. While tangible savings can be realized from looking
at these two processes independently, the real value of this opportunity comes when
companies harness the power of one seamless travel and expense management process.
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5. Strategies for Success – The White Paper Series from Concur
The Power of an End-To-End Solution
Having explored the benefits of automating travel management and expense reporting
with solutions that are independent of one another, we now turn our attention to how
a single, automated, end-to-end travel and expense management solution amplifies the
effects of those benefits.
Progressive companies that recognize the value of an integrated approach are looking
to technology suppliers to provide them the solutions they need to automate the entire
process. Luckily for these companies, these solutions exist in the market today. On top
of automating the entire travel and expense management process, technology suppliers
also have developed robust reporting capabilities that provide companies with
enhanced visibility into their T&E spend. By automating the entire travel procurement,
expense submission, approval, and reimbursement process – and leveraging the
resulting data – these organizations are able to drive additional costs out of their
businesses and extract even greater business value from the data they collect. The average
A smart, end-to-end corporate travel management and expense reporting solution
delivers significant value by helping companies link the travel and expense corporation
management functions, putting greater controls and reporting mechanisms in place
that help drive additional costs out of their business. For example, an end-to-end processes 43,000
solution can streamline the process from start to finish, and pre-populate information
where possible – not only from the solution itself but also from integration with third- expense reports
party T&E suppliers – in order to further reduce data entry and reliance on paper
receipts, making the one-touch experience for both the traveler and the company a per $1 billion in
reality. Additionally with robust, automated business rules, reporting and analytics
found in an end-to-end solution comes the ability for companies to capture even revenue. 8
greater amounts of information about their travel and expense programs.
And, with automation comes real-time decision making capability including the
ability to:
• Approve travel spend BEFORE it occurs
• Corroborate travel bookings with transaction receipts in smarter and more
efficient ways, to ensure the traveler paid and expensed the same amount as
what was booked
• Recognize trends of their business travelers and modify a corporate travel program
to increase the satisfaction of the travelers
• Use that same trend data to negotiate smarter with travel inventory suppliers
• Help ensure greater corporate expense policy compliance and eliminate fraud
Below is a summary of the primary ways a unified travel and expense management
process further benefits companies today and amplifies the value of automation. With
travel booking, expense reporting, auditing and payment finally all integrated, the click
that the employee uses to book the trip can literally take care of everything else. The
key takeaway is that when companies eliminate the line between travel and expense by
uniting these interrelated processes, and use a single automated solution to manage
that process, the resulting benefit is that these businesses optimize their travel and
expense management program, run even more efficiently and extract even greater
value from their T&E spend.
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6. Strategies for Success – The White Paper Series from Concur
User Satisfaction: The single most important success metric to the implementation of
any travel and expense management solution is user satisfaction. This is best measured
by user adoption levels. Because the entire process is now made seamless – travelers
are presented with all of their available booking options before they book and their
expense reports are automatically populated with accurate travel expense data based
on what they spent - it makes procuring a trip easy, and submitting an expense report
even easier. Smart use of travel and expense technology enables users to quickly
complete their travel procurement and expense reports with one touch, which will
increase a company’s adoption level and drive further satisfaction from its users.
Lower Operating Costs: These additional cost savings include preventing unauthorized
travel expenses before they occur, eliminating duplicate expense reports or the need
to approve the same expense items more than once, and finally, further reducing the
chance of human error by eliminating more manual processes and touch-points.
Increased Productivity: Users of a unified solution are able to more quickly complete
the travel booking and expense reporting process – or even skip the expense reporting
process altogether due to smarter use of all data sources – thereby giving them more 13.2 percent
time to focus on their core area of expertise. Managers spend less time focusing on
policy enforcement, data accuracy or compliance, and more time maximizing their of fraud cases
travel and expense management budget, confident that their travelers are working
within the established travel and expense guidelines. involve T&E
Reconciliation Across Business Functions: Automated reconciliation of expense
items across multiple credit sources mitigates the risk of submitting an expense
reimbursements
item more than once, preventing duplicate entries and reducing the potential for
fraudulent activity.
with a median
Enterprise Business Intelligence: The more an organization automates its business loss of $25,000
processes and the more its employees adopt those solutions, the more informed its
managers will be. With access to information captured within automated solutions, each instance. 9
managers can make timely and informed decisions in response to business and market
changes. And, when an organization expands the automation of its travel and expense
management process across additional business units, the aggregate data collected
across those businesses provides even greater intelligence across the entire enterprise
– intelligence that can be turned into tangible business value.
Best Practices Across Business Functions: A unified data stream of travel spend,
disbursements and reimbursements creates a high degree of quality and consistency
in the data collected for analysis. Specific examples of how this information aligns a
company to manage the entire business include:
• Reports on air, hotel and car expenses that have occurred and have not yet been
submitted as an expense, making cash management more predictable
• Visibility into expenses that have already been approved in the travel management
solution, eliminating the need to re-approve them in the expense solution
• Alerts and reporting on air, hotel, and car rental expenses that fall within corporate
policy, but were purchased outside of the end-to-end travel and expense process,
mitigating any potential leakage or inefficiencies
• Statistical analysis on payments, sourcing and vendor details to further optimize
cost control and vendor agreements across the travel and expense process
Providing cross-business functionality through an integrated solution provides a single
access and a single source of traveler information, eliminating the need for a second
support infrastructure for a subsequent application.
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