Chrome River CURRENTS

At many organizations, finance officers are taking note of the significant savings and operational benefits offered by today’s cloud-computing solutions. According to a recent article on wiredFINANCE, a blog from Business Finance magazine, cloud-based services and tools offer a number of advantages, including low cost and efficiency. Here are five benefits to consider in relation to your company’s expense management and online expense reporting.

Many companies today cultivate preferred vendor relationships in hopes of securing better prices, customer service and spending visibility, according to an article in CFO Magazine. With business travel on the rise, organizations are wise to develop preferred suppliers for such items as airfare, hotel rooms and rental cars. However, getting the most out of these relationships requires a streamlined, strategic approach to travel expense management.

Armed with a calculator and a pencil, you compare an employee’s expense report to her receipts and find a mathematical error. Congratulations: You’ve just saved the company $35. The only problem is that auditing these business expense reports can easily end up costing more than it saves, especially if you manually process the reports.

Reimbursing employees for expenses is already complicated — especially if you’re processing the expense reports manually. Keeping your expense policy in compliance with all laws adds an additional layer of complexity. Effective expense management provides managers with greater visibility into spending, minimizing such risks as lack of compliance with statutory requirements.

With cloud-based services growing more robust and popular, automated invoice management tools present many businesses and organizations with new ways to cut costs. These tools, available as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription, can ease or eliminate data entry and help managers control expenses through improved visibility.

As the economy continues to recover, many companies are now planning to hire additional employees and increase capital investments, according to an article on the CFO Magazine website. When a company has new initiatives on the horizon, it’s more important than ever for managers to track and monitor their employees’ business expense reports.

At the lunch meeting, you paid with your credit card and slipped the receipt into your pocket. But later when you met a client for a drink, you paid with cash. Now, two weeks later, you can’t really remember how much you spent at the bar, and you’ve gone through all of your clothes trying to find that lunch receipt. If only you could log these kinds of details as you go using something you already carry with you everywhere.

For growing companies, keeping up with ever-evolving technology is a core objective. The key to successfully executing on that objective is to ensure that the changes being implemented will be adopted by employees. With computer literacy levels varying dramatically within an organization, driving that adoption is easier said than done.

Expense report approval and reimbursement is one of the processes for which forward-looking businesses have turned to technology in order to cut costs, speed turnaround time, and increase data reportability. Such companies recognize that the process of shuffling paper receipts from desk to desk for approval and allocation is no longer a viable solution. They also recognize that most home-grown systems can't offer all the functionally and analytics offered by vendors that focus exclusively on expense reporting.

Recognizing the need for and role of technology in dramatically improving the expense reporting process is a great first step. The daunting task then becomes finding a differentiating factor in the solutions that are available. The key factor to focus on is how much effort it will take to get users to adopt the system. Keep in mind that there are valuable people in an organization who aren't as computer savvy as others.

Welcome to the Chrome River Currents monthly digest! Each month we highlight the latest news and analysis on business travel, expense management and online expense reporting. This month, we’re focusing on helping organizations use cloud-based software in tracking business expenses. We offer tips on using analytics and mobile tools, and introduce our four-part series on reporting travel and entertainment expenses under an IRS accountable plan.

Welcome to the Chrome River Currents monthly digest! Each month we highlight the latest news and analysis on business travel, expense management and online expense reporting. This month, we’re focusing on helping organizations use cloud-based software in tracking business expenses. We offer tips on using analytics and mobile tools, and introduce our four-part series on reporting travel and entertainment expenses under an IRS accountable plan.