Chrome River CURRENTS

Need socks, groceries and pet food? Sure, that’s fine. Feel the need to buy some new golf clubs or maybe a teepee? Hey, that’s your concern. Want to gamble on the lottery — or a cosmetic surgery procedure? It’s no big deal until you try to slip them past your employer as expense claims.

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 time, we’re focusing on the benefits of automating business expense reports. We’ll show you how new cloud-based tracking, analytics and reporting tools can help your company simplify travel reimbursement, negotiate discounts and other cost savings, and identify possible fraud. 

Providing corporate credit cards to employees has many financial and operational benefits, and it helps streamline travel expense management. Using corporate credit cards tends to reduce expense report fraud, but you’ll still need to keep an eye out for employees trying to beat the system.

In business travel, most expenses are fairly routine matters and handled by the book. Airfare, hotel, rental car, taxi rides and meals. However, what about when an employee expenses, say, a goat? Unquestionably, these animals have been allies to humans for millennia, but it’s hard to envision a goat’s role in the context of, say, an onsite software installation.

One of your employees pads his mileage on reimbursement forms. Another conveniently loses a receipt for a less-expensive meal so she can claim the $25 maximum reimbursement. For most companies, this kind of petty theft is no big deal. If the amounts lost are small, it might seem easier to ignore the problem than to investigate, but expense report fraud can have large indirect consequences.

Most of us already know that the United States Postal Service is in grave financial trouble due to people communicating more through email, and it is no surprise that runaway travel expenses are also contributing to their huge losses. The agency lost an estimated $16 billion last year, and part of that was more than $1 million in over payment of travel expenses. An expense system with automated expense controls, real-time receipt visibility, and built-in expense rules that are automatically enforced could have curtailed the majority of this abuse, helping to cut Postal Service costs.

It seems like there are some people who not only take their expense accounts for granted, but also flagrantly misuse them to the extent that it’s fraud. Read about some eye-popping expense reports that baffle the mind – as in – what were they thinking?

The breaking news that the Labour Member of Parliament for Rotherham, Denis MacShane, is facing a 12-month suspension from the House of Commons for submitting false invoices that were “plainly intended to deceive” highlights the constant diligence required of organisations to monitor and control their expenses and incoming invoices.

This was also the subject of a September survey that found nearly one-third of 1,000 UK employees who took taxis for work admitted that they routinely cheated on such expense claims. The people polled indicated that they added to the taxi bill or expensed fares that were not business related.

 "Taxi Receipt" Photo. Ebay.co.uk 10 Jun. 2012. 06 Nov. 2012 <http://www.ebay.co.uk>.

The quality of your expense reporting speaks to the type of worker you are.  Do evaluations reflect frugal or flighty spending, careful or careless tracking, a dinged or distinguished history? Too many tallies in the wrong category can echo negative opinions about professionalism and work ethic. When it’s read in black and white, what do expense reports say about you?