Global telecommunications association TeleManagement Forum has reaped the benefits from automating its expense reporting process, even though the nonprofit firm has a worldwide labor force of only about 60 people.
The Morristown, N.J.-based association about three years ago switched from an Excel-based system for travel and entertainment expense management to the Expensewatch.com solution, TeleManagement CFO James Metzger said. Prior to the switch, there was little visibility to the process, inconsistent reimbursement times and limited oversight of reports from management, he said.
"We had the whole litany of what goes on with using Excel and a process that's not really controlled," Metzger said. "It was very labor-intensive and very inaccurate."
In early 2004, TeleManagement went live with the solution, which Bill Vergantino, CEO of Expensewatch, said targets clients with revenues of $5 million to $100 million. Although small companies have yet to reach anywhere near critical mass in automating their expense reporting tools, lower cost and ease of implementation have made it more common, as illustrated in Business Travel News' third annual Expense/Payment Manager Survey
(BTN, Oct. 23).Effective expense management can be more critical to smaller companies because of the large impact even a few deviations from the travel program can have on a limited budget, Metzger said. If an employee books an unauthorized first-class ticket or adds a night at the hotel bar to his expense report, it's a high priority for small businesses to stop that activity, he said. Travel spend is about 15 percent of TeleManagement's budget.
"In larger companies, so much is being spent on travel that if it gets lost in the maze, it isn't a big deal," said Metzger. "For us, if you do that enough times, it really adds up and hurts our bottom line. Any slip is magnified that much more."
Metzger said TeleManagement was better able to enforce its rules, such as requiring that employees show the business purpose if there is a dinner with more than one person, with Expensewatch.com. Employees could get a better idea of when they would be reimbursed, he said, and managers had a better handle on receipts through imaging.
Reimbursement accuracy was greatly improved because of automated help with the number of currencies with which the association deals, Metzger said. TeleManagement has employees in countries including Greece, Ireland, France and Malaysia, and the tool allows the association to reimburse employees directly in local currency, he said.
The expense reporting overhaul now has TeleManagement on the same page as the members of its board, which include executives from such telecommunications giants as AT&T, Nokia and Motorola, Metzger said. It was a part of a larger change in the association's travel policy as employees migrated to a corporate card and contractors were directed to a corporate travel site for booking.
As a result, TeleManagement also has been able to directly cut its travel costs, he said. Even though it doesn't have the volume to negotiate many discounts with airlines and hotels, it has been able to negotiate with Continental Airlines and Virgin Atlantic Airways on the Newark-London route that it frequently uses.
"That's something we never would have been able to do with everyone putting the spend on their own credit cards," he said. "It's also definitely helped us in auditing. It's been a massive change in the way we do business."
Besides the T&E module, Expensewatch.com also provides tools for purchasing and invoice management, allowing smaller companies to integrate those components, which often has not been financially feasible in the past, Vergantino said. "The net result is that our customers are seeing a tremendous 400 percent ROI in year one in the systems," he said. "These companies have not been able to take care of the software that can help them automate these processes because they don't have the budgets and don't have the people, but we have the full-blown software as a service."