No, it's 8. But that's the sort of confusion that paper-based reporting or semi-automation can bring. Travel and Expense budgets are expanding by the year, and no company can afford to have multiple versions of the truth as the numbers start stacking. Everyone knows that of course, but there are some hidden costs that come with an inefficient system that are not only hard to calculate but even harder to eliminate (don’t worry we'll cover some solutions here too. No one likes a doomsayer less than us.)
So, without further ado, here are the top 8 areas we recommend you study right away or hidden costs:
Workforce productivity
Your sales team is supposed to be selling. Concentrating on building relationships and finding the next source of revenue. If the state of your CRM is any proof, sales people hate filling out reports. Loading them with yet more will only make them averse to traveling, or have them thinking of shortcuts to bypass the system. The same holds true for your maintenance and customer success teams.
Corporate travel is planned with an agenda linked to business goals and any support systems should be supporting these goals, primarily by freeing up as much time as possible for productive tasks. The long chain of processes and documentation along with approval required to fly for business not only eat up productive time but also the mind space of your employees. Add efficiency to support processes and productivity will take care of itself.
Reporting errors
Notwithstanding the multiple versions of the truth we mentioned before, the time required in reconciliation and corrections is impossible to track but usually substantial. Do you ever feel that the time and effort required by your backend team vs the number of tickets and reports being processed is off? That's because it is. Your people are probably doing their best but with manual data logging and paper receipts, errors become unavoidable.
It’s better to nip the problem in the bud rather than creating yet more processes for reconciliation, rectification, and approvals which only create yet more steps in the process where errors can creep in. Eventually, you chain is too long to reasonably audit, making audits dreadful (or at least more dreadful than they already are!)
The finance team's mental state
Spoke to someone on the finance team recently? Do they seem frustrated and angry? Well, that's perfectly normal. But if they seem angrier and more frustrated than usual, look at their desk and check how high the stack of travel expense reimbursement reports and receipts is. It's no laughing matter.
The finance team is the backbone of the enterprise, making sure that creative entrepreneurs don't creatively run themselves into the ground. They need to be working on cutting costs and ensuring sound financial health and compliance and not pushing files or spending hours every day entering and correcting data. Endless excel sheets feeding manual reports will still not show you how much time and effort went into making them possible.
Policy fraud
Travel and Expense budgetary policies are only as effective as their implementation, which usually means they’re not very effective at all. A quick way to check if things are working in your company is to ask a few employees which travel policies they are aware of. Not too many I'm sure, and that's the way it should be.
Employees need to concentrate on their jobs and what helps them grow. Reading and retaining financial policies is never part of the job description. Of course, the outcome is that policy adherence is usually at the reimbursement stage and leads to arguments and yet more time spent in reconciliation. Policy implementation needs to become proactive rather than reactive for it to be effective.
Delayed visibility = Missed Opportunities
We don't want to talk about 'analytics' and 'actionable insights' here because we're as tired of hearing those words as you are. But the cost of not being able to see where you’re going as a company can be very high. Everyone gets reports of some sort, how detailed or insightful is another question. But is it monthly, weekly, or daily?
The key here is real-time visibility. The right report is the one that can get to you right now. If you don't have it, there's something you're probably not looking at that you should be.
Cost of paper
Yes, Go Green etc. etc. But more importantly, keep your green where it belongs, in your pocket. Filing multiple copies or every receipt and report and sending copies of files to multiple desks for checks and corrections, not to mention reprinting after changes and approvals are costing you more paper, ink, and electricity than you might imagine.
In this day and age, going digital and centralizing all your data is a hygiene factor. If you can’t imagine throwing those printers out without bringing your finance department to a grinding halt, you've missed a trick somewhere along the way.
Data duplication and mismatch
And we're back to those annoying multiple versions of the truth. Does anyone know what the actual costs were at any point in time? We're not talking about the hidden costs here, we mean the visible, actual costs that we know we can track. Why are there two receipts for the same expense with different numbers? Why does it look like the receipt was written by a doctor making it impossible to understand the components of the receipt?
>Manual receipts and inefficiency in digitization make it impossible to analyse spending. Excel or semi-automated systems are not capable of throwing up errors or helping you correct them. Adopting some degree of automation is essential to ensuring that all your data is central, true and usable.
Lengthy reimbursement timelines
And finally, the one hidden cost that we all see and feel. You'd be lying if you said it has never pinched you personally. An employee that must wait months to receive a reimbursement for an expense incurred by the company is being short-changed (literally). Employee motivation and engagement can suffer terribly from these minor issues, that may not be minor to the person in question. Speedy, painless reimbursement instils a sense of confidence in the company and frees up people's mind space and time for what really matters.
And finally, the one hidden cost that we all see and feel. You'd be lying if you said it has never pinched you personally. An employee that must wait months to receive a reimbursement for an expense incurred by the company is being short-changed (literally). Employee motivation and engagement can suffer terribly from these minor issues, that may not be minor to the person in question. Speedy, painless reimbursement instils a sense of confidence in the company and frees up people's mind space and time for what really matters.
Automated travel expense logging
Automated expense logging, hopefully, right from your mobile phone would enable instant, seamless reporting. Click pictures of your receipts and attach them to reports and use all that free time to do whatever else was on your to-do list for the day.
Automated compliance
Imagine if a hidden hand could stop you from making an expense when you’re travelling that you won't get reimbursed for? Automated compliance makes sure that all expenses are in-line with company policy, cutting down the time required to reconcile and check expenses.
Deep analytics through centralized data
All your travel and expense data in one place. One single digitized and centralized storehouse of everything you'll ever want to analyse. All those expensive analytics tools are for naught without something to feed them, just as the well-paid strategist will find it tough to make any decisions without the right information at the right time. Can't make bricks without clay, to quote Holmes.
Cost savings
All that time spent looking for the best airline deal, only to lose it waiting for the approval to come through. Automation can bring the best deals to you while also automating the approval process through automated compliance. Booking with a single click, logging the expense instantly and receiving a reimbursement right away sounds like a dream, but it's not only possible but also easy.
If the people in your company have grown tired of hearing your gripes about how Travel and Expense management could be better, talk to us. We're busy composing an anthology of horror stories in that department and we would love to have you contribute. Who knows, maybe we can pass on a few tricks that worked for us that might just work for you. Leave your comments in the comments, obviously.
