Co. Plumbs Card-Expense Tool Link

Plumbing equipment manufacturer Moen Inc. boosted its card adoption rate to 94 percent, caught about $300,000 of nonsubmitted card charges and heavily cut turnaround time for expense reports by integrating its card and expense tools.

The North Olmsted, Ohio-based firm in 2004 switched to a JPMorgan Chase-issued Visa corporate card for online reporting purposes, and began using the CardLink service offered by Gelco Expense Management—Moen's vendor since 1990—in May 2006, said Rhonda Baracskai, Moen's manager of financial services. Once the two were linked—a growing practice in companies the size of Moen's, which has about 900 business travelers and several million dollars in booked air volume—Baracskai said she understood why some consider such integration a best practice.

"A Web-based expense reporting tool is strong on its own," Baracskai said. "When you have that card integration, you really are setting up the tightest expense reporting that you have."

The most measurable impact came from reducing the time it took travelers to file their reports, Baracskai said. Prior to the integration, they had to manually input each expense into the report. Now, expenses automatically are moved from the card into the report and categorized, so travelers' responsibility mostly entails reviewing the reports, she said.

Accounting accuracy also has increased, she said. With manual processes, travelers often would input an item twice or put in an inaccurate amount.

"Gelco paid based on what the associate entered, and down the road, it led to an irreconcilable charge card amount," Baracskai said. "Also, with the interface, it's truly impossible to go past due unless you don't turn on the expense software at all."

Previously, Moen also could not tell which expenses had been incurred but not submitted on the card, which is paid on a corporate rather than the individual level. Following the integration, Moen found there had been about $300,000 in such charges.

Visa's acceptance level has proved beneficial, she said, as travelers incur a lot of nontraditional travel expenses, such as flowers for clients. Combined with the ease of creating reports, Moen now has seen out-of-pocket expenses drop significantly, and its card adoption rate of 94 percent is well over the industry average of about 70 percent.

"It's the highest we've ever seen, and the highest Gelco's ever seen," said JPMorgan Chase vice president of commercial card products Frank Dombroski.

Both JPMorgan Chase and Gelco have singled out Moen for its integration success as the two vendors aim to improve further their integration capabilities. Gelco is expanding its number of issuer relationships and is bettering the quality of data it can integrate, said Ann Altepeter, Gelco vice president of solutions and alliances.

"In 2007, we will be delivering against level-three data, and that gets the employee one step closer to touchless," according to Altepeter. "Once we incorporate CardLink and enhanced data, we will be unique in the marketplace."

JPMorgan Chase, meanwhile, is developing technologies to tighten relationships with cardholder databases, Dombroski said. "We have opportunities to try to close some of the redundancies between the systems," he said. "The ultimate goal is to eliminate as much duplication and possibility for inaccuracies as possible."