MaxIT Healthcare, a consulting firm for technology and staffing for the healthcare industry, transformed its travel and entertainment expense reporting methods to a paperless process with the help of hundreds of portable receipt scanners its travelers carry.
Robert Moore, COO and founding partner of the Westfield, Ind.-based firm and self-confessed gadget fan, said the idea for the change first blossomed when he saw the NeatReceipts Scanalizer tool in an airplane catalogue. It seemed like an effective solution for the firm, which has between $2 million and $12 million in annual booked air volume and employees traveling to client sites on a weekly basis, he said. Up to that point, handling of expense receipts was done entirely on paper.
"It was very labor-intensive," Moore said. "People would have to mail all these receipts, or they would lose them."
The portable scanner allows travelers to image receipts into PDF, Quicken or Excel files as well as the specific NeatReceipts software and send it to the proper authority while traveling. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service last year determined that such a reporting method was acceptable for tax purposes, Moore said.
MaxIT Healthcare went live with the scanners for its travelers at the beginning of this year and now uses close to 300 of them, he said. The scanner, small enough to fit in travelers' bags next to their notebooks, exports PDFs of receipts to the accounting office as they receive them.
"When the accountants come in each morning to verify expenses, they have a queue of things to approve," Moore said. "They click on an expense to open the attachment, view the expense and approve it."
The new process has saved hours of work for both accountants and travelers, who can scan the receipts while on a flight home, he said. MaxIT Healthcare plans to expand on that efficiency by further integrating it with its Juris accounting system, set to complete by year-end.
Philadelphia-based NeatReceipts said it has installed about 5,000 of its scanner tools in companies using at least five of them. Companies typically install only about 10 of the units, but some have installed as many as 400 for imaging purposes.
Spawned by the need for greater audit controls in the wake of the 2002 U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act, receipt imaging is becoming an increasingly common practice for businesses looking to streamline spend management processes. In addition to such do-it-yourself methods as MaxIT Healthcare's, most major expense reporting tool providers offer an imaging option, and report rising demand for that capability
(BTN, Aug. 15, 2005).Incorporating the scanners mostly was a seamless process, Moore said. The announcement that MaxIT Healthcare was moving to a paperless reporting process was met with a standing ovation at a company meeting in October, he said.
"When you roll something out, people usually complain," Moore said. "With the scanners themselves, I haven't heard anybody complain. It's the efficiency of using it: It doesn't take up a lot of space, and you can create a PDF on the fly."
The scanners have added benefits—for both business and personal needs—for employees in addition to expense reporting, he said. They also can use them to scan contracts and other documents as well as business cards they collect during travel, which they can immediately convert into Excel spreadsheets.
In addition, NeatReceipts recently made its product compatible with TurboTax software, which allows users to import information directly from deductible receipts, according to the company.
"Our goal was to make it really simple for employees," Moore said. "We like working with companies that are on the cutting edge, and NeatReceipts and Juris are two of those companies."