Demand for better intelligence on travel spending is prompting a new wave of data integration that automatically matches booked to billed and expensed. End-to-end travel management has been promised for more than a decade, but actual benefits have yet to be widely documented. Several vendors now promise delivery of richer data sets for better decision-making.
Vendors including Concur Technologies, Hogg Robinson Group, KDS and Amadeus/SAP have recently touted end-to-end solutions that link four critical components of the travel process: booking, payment, expense reconciliation and data analysis. Deeper integration of booked, billed and payment data is also promoted by such providers as Hi-Mark Software, Cornerstone Information Systems, Prism Group, Tri-Pen TravelMaster and TRX?Inc.
Simply by integrating automated expense reporting and payment feeds, companies surveyed for a Visa/Deloitte Consulting report in 2002 cited annual savings of $900,000 to $4.5 million. Surveyed companies derived savings primarily from more efficient expense reporting processes for employees and accounts payable departments.
The improvement in next-generation solutions is in automatically matching bookings with electronic feeds of line-item billed data. This eases the travel reconciliation process for travelers and provides the company with richer data to analyze, compare and leverage. Key to this delivery is automating both the booking and expense ends of the travel process, integrating payment feeds and encouraging travelers to use the payment card for as much of their expenses as possible.
It's been more than a decade since online booking, expense reporting, e-folio and end-to-end were first heralded as the next great advancements in travel management. Online booking in the U.S. has reached an estimated 37 percent penetration level within corporations and is expected to climb to nearly 48 percent by 2008, according to research firm PhoCusWright. Automated expense reporting adoption also is growing, with penetration estimates of 15 percent, according to market research by vendors Gelco and Concur, or 40 percent, according to consulting firm PayStream Advisors. All predicted rapid adoption over the next year by large and mid-size companies.
Aberdeen Research in an August report said usage of card products--procurement, business cards and fleet--for business expenses is less than 50 percent overall, but has been adopted by more than three-quarters of "best practice" companies. Growing volumes charged to American Express, MasterCard and Visa business cards also indicate that something is driving greater usage of these payment options. In 2005, the commercial cards of Visa and MasterCard generated $222.4 billion in goods and services purchasing , up nearly 24 percent from 2004, according to payment industry newsletter The Nilson Report. Purchasing cards rang up nearly 29 percent of commercial card totals, while corporate cards (including MasterCard's MultiCard) accounted for almost 11 percent. The bulk of the charges were from small business credit and debit cards.
Electronic folio databy year-end is expected to be available from more than North American 12,000 hotel properties for MasterCard cardholders. American Express and Visa, likewise, are receiving hotel e-folio feeds from thousands of hotel properties, including such chains as Choice, Hilton and Marriott. Randy Jones, director of enterprise accounting services at Marriott International, said "60 percent to 80 percent of spend at global corporations will be funneled into these reports" in 2007.
At its user group meeting last month, Concur announced plans to release by mid-year the new eReceipt feature of its integrated Cliqbook booking and Concur expense suite. Concur has been pulling in card data from every source clients use, said president Rajeev Singh, but the new product would have the ability to pipe in electronic receipts from travel vendors--initially Hertz and Hilton--and eliminate the need for paper. Concur plans to automatically match receipts to payment feeds and bookings, and, to incentivize travelers, include an eReceipts icon in its booking tool for listings of participating vendors. Concur said the eReceipts would be "IRS-approved."
Spendvision and majority owner HRG also are integrating line-item detail from payment cards--as well as from mobile phone bills--offering increased insight into total spend and analysis.