As expense management programs mature, travel managers are moving usability into the spotlight. More than half of the respondents to Business Travel News’ 2015 Expense Manager Survey rated the importance of easing expense report preparation for employees a five on an ascending five-point scale of benefits, indicating they considered it “most important.” That figure is up from the 46 percent who ranked usability supreme in 2013, the last year BTN conducted the survey.
A total of 186 BTN and Travel Procurement readers who indicated they had expense management responsibilities responded to the survey sent out by BTN in January and February 2015. Not all respondents answered every question. Both travelers and buyers indicated receipt imaging was the most important expense management system feature, with average ratings of 4.34 and 4.25 respectively, on the ascending five-point scale. While buyers rated customizable reporting an average of 4.25, making it their second most important feature, travelers indicated prepopulation of credit card data—with an average rating of 4.28—was the second-most important feature.
University of Colorado assistant vice president and chief procurement officer Sandy Hicks, for one, found that expense management systems that are easy to use also promote policy compliance and yield enhanced data accuracy.
“A few years back, it was about compliance and cost savings,” said SAP vice president of product management for travel and expense solutions Hendrik Vordenbaeumen. “Now [clients] are trying to focus more on the traveler … [and] an end-to-end [solution that gets] data from different sources and creates the expense solution more or less on the fly so the traveler doesn’t have to do too many things.”
Insperity Expense Management division president Heath Butler, whose online ExpensAble tool automates and streamlines reporting, added that employers often focus on spend control when choosing policies, and those same policies can make booking travel and reporting expenses more difficult. “How easy the process is for employees is up to the employer and the policies they choose.”
Consolidation & a Shift to Mobile
Longtime expense management provider IBM in May acknowledged it would retire its Global Expense Reporting Solutions by March 31, 2016, and partnered with Concur for an exclusive reselling agreement. Then, in December, in one of the biggest cloud technology acquisitions in history, SAP acquired Concur in an $8.3 billion deal. The deal merged three competitors under one umbrella.
Concur CEO Steve Singh in January told The Beat that Concur would operate as a separate business unit and inherit profit-and-loss responsibility for SAP’s Ariba expense management and Fieldglass vendor management systems under the new Business Network Group. He additionally said Concur would transition SAP T&E customers to Concur Travel and Expense, “as it makes sense for them.”
Meanwhile, Vordenbaeumen told BTN that SAP would merge SAP Cloud for Travel and Expense into Concur and continue operating SAP’s 26-year-old on-premise expense solution, used by up to 40 percent of SAP customers. “The on-premise solution will stay around because functionality-wise, it’s pretty stable and has all the functionalities customers are asking for.”
An even higher percentage of respondents to BTN’s survey, 64 percent, use an ERP expense solution, compared with 36 percent who run on a fully cloud-based system.
Nevertheless, consolidation in the industry is prompting companies to re-evaluate their expense management systems. According to the survey, 33 percent of respondents since January 2014 implemented online expense reimbursement systems and 28 percent upgraded to new ones.
On par with the trend, online expense management firm Chrome River in 2014 acquired six former GERS clients, and Certify last year told BTN that while more than half of its clients are first-time adopters migrating from manual processes, up to 30 percent are customers switching from ERP solutions.
Food container manufacturer Dart, which in 2014 spent $13 million on travel, is transitioning from three different systems to SAP Cloud for Travel and Expense. The majority of its 2,000 travelers use SumTotal’s Boomerang Expense solution, while others use GERS and another group manually compiles reports, explained the company’s travel services manager Cheryl Benjamin.
A selling point for SAP, she said, was mobile applications, which allow users to photograph receipts and automatically sync receipts with credit card charges. “It’s doing a lot of work for the traveler, and as an on-the-go solution, we can approve expense reports through the app. We’re still trying to meet the needs of business financials, but we need to make it easier [for travelers].”
When asked if Dart would ultimately transition to the Concur platform, as Vordenbaeumen indicated would come to pass for SAP Cloud for Travel and Expense clients, Benjamin said that discussion had yet to take place.
Vordenbaeumen said customers generally are looking for cloud-based systems that offer mobile apps and invoices and automatic credit card integration. “Every customer is looking into mobile,” he emphasized.
Existing mobile applications, though, will have to improve with the times. Hicks, for one, wants University of Colorado travelers to be able to calculate per-diem rates in the Concur mobile app, as they can on the desktop version. “In the desktop version, it’ll have all the days sitting in there, and you can click on meals that were provided and it calculates everything for you. It works great. It would be nice if it were over on the mobile app. It’s on the roadmap, but until we can do the end-to-end, the app isn’t as good as it could be.”
Insperity’s Butler summed it up: “People want in their professional life the experience they’re having in their personal life, in their consumer experience.”
How Ease of Use Saved One Employer $260,000
The University of Colorado is a Concur Travel & Expense client whose 5,000 cardholders spent almost $33 million on travel in its 2014 fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2014. The university last year began simplifying its expense reporting and travel booking processes. “It’s just the little changes you can make that actually make a big difference,” assistant vice president and chief procurement officer Sandy Hicks said. During its 2014 fiscal year, the university saved $260,000, which it can reinvest in its travel program. Hicks’ team took the following approach.
- The university increased the minimum value of expenses for which receipts are required to $75, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service’s threshold, from $25. “We always want to see how we can make travel easier for users, so if they have to account for less receipts, that’s helpful,” Hicks said.
- It increased the range of searchable departure times available on its booking tool from three hours before or after the target departure time to four hours. The change allowed the booking tool to capture departing flights before the former 6 a.m. cut-off time. For example, a traveler who punched in a 9 a.m. desired departure out of Denver now also can see a 5:50 a.m. option. The change “made people’s life easier,” Hicks said.
- It’s pushing travelers to use more mobile applications, including Concur’s TripIt Pro and T&E mobile applications. It also prefers that travelers use Christopherson Business Travel’s online booking tool, but the $6 transaction fee CBT levies has deterred some travelers. To increase adoption, the university this year began settling the $6 charge centrally. “We’ve already seen our usage tick up 3 percentage points,” according to Hicks, noting that the university pays the CBT fees out of the $260,000 in savings.
- The university switched the liability burden for its travel cards from individuals to the school. That means users need only reconcile expenses instead of waiting to pay the bill until they get reimbursed. Thanks to that centralization, “now we’re getting a rebate off of that program,” Hicks said.
- Since the University of Colorado began managing its travel spend in 2011, it’s received better data, which has allowed it to better negotiate its airline contracts, Hicks explained. The university in FY2014 spent about $14 million on air, about 42 percent of its total travel spend.
This report originally appeared in the April 6, 2015, issue of Business Travel News.