Chrome River CURRENTS

Pot, weed, mary jane, cannabis, edibles – or as they call it today – “medical marijuana,” doesn’t seem like a likely item to turn into your boss on a expense report, does it? But, that’s exactly what a TV reporter from KPIX, a San Francisco CBS affiliate, did when he submitted $600 worth of expenses for all kinds of “high-quality medical marijuana.” Interesting expenses, right? If you were the reporter’s boss, would you approve these expenses? Well, turns out, the expenses were actually legitimate.

We tend to assume that technology will help speed up whatever we’re doing, right? We can share photos with our families and friends in seconds rather than days, shift money from one account to another without stepping inside a bank, and so on. But sometimes the reverse is true of technology—think of how painful it can be to navigate through a complicated voicemail system.

A 2014 study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that upper management accounts for close to 30% of reimbursement fraud cases. It doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to know that behaviors (good or bad) that are exhibited by top managers will eventually be modeled by employees. Couple poor behaviors by executives with lax expense reporting procedures and you have a recipe for systemic expense fraud in your organization. Whether you’re currently dealing with this situation or seeking preventative expense controls, you can take steps now that will help crush expense report fraud in 2015.

Money, money, money! Where does it go? Keeping track of expenses can be a challenge, and it's vitally important for any organization to keep a close eye on the outflow of funds. However, training staff to track expenses can be tricky, especially when it's done manually. When your expenses aren't tracked properly, it costs your organization time and money. Using expense management software can make your staff feel much more financially savvy and will help control your expenses.

A recent survey of 173 corporate travel and expense managers found that they receive more and more bookings via mobile devices. Clearly, business travelers are becoming more comfortable with booking flights and hotels using their mobile devices. To that end, travel and expense management systems from top providers are becoming more vital components in corporate travel managers' toolboxes.

In July, the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), a trade organization for corporate travel and expense managers, held its annual meeting in Los Angeles, California.  Topics that generated the most buzz at the meeting were the huge increase in corporate travel globally and the risks of managing corporate travelers across disparate global destinations.

According to a recent Homeland Security Department report, checking in from your home computer leaves big companies vulnerable to hackers, who scan corporate systems looking to find the remote access software that lets employees look at the system while they are not on the job site.

Is the complexity of your office environment making business more difficult? Clutter can be defined as scattered items or, for businesses, disordered processes that impede or reduce organizational effectiveness, productivity and revenue. The manufacturing industry has spent decades de-cluttering their factory floors, machining processes and assembly techniques. Today, unfortunately this is no longer limited to manufacturing; the typical office environment has extreme organizational clutter.

If the news that close to half (42%) of the 958 travel managers polled in the 2014 AirPlus International survey are bracing for significant increases in travel costs has you tempted to go back to micromanaging every nickel and dime – doling out travel vouchers like they were a precious commodity – you might want to rethink that strategy.

Electronic invoicing and mobile payment options are among the hottest trends in business today. Although many travel managers are familiar with these payment technologies, they don't see implementing them as a priority. Their concern lies instead with optimizing their company’s expense management system, according to a recent survey by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA). Results of this survey also showed that expense managers were much more interested in recording or imaging receipts and collecting travel data in one single database than adding mobile payment options to their travel management mix.