Necho has upgraded its automated expense management solution with more than 100 enhancements, including better corporate structure, an improved integration console and expansion of receipt-imaging capabilities.
Toronto-based Necho, now a division of Parsippany, N.J.-based software company CyberShift following its acquisition last year
(BTN, Dec. 5, 2005), is unveiling its Necho Expense 7.5 solution this week at the National Business Travel Association 2006 International Convention and Expo in Chicago. The release has been in development for about 11 months and was designed with both customer requests and the competition in mind, said Craig Fearon, senior product director at Necho.
One of the major enhancements relates to receipt imaging, an area in which Necho already is a market leader, Fearon said. For about three years, Necho has partnered with Chandler, Ariz.-based ImageTag to provide digital filing.
Necho's upgrade now allows for versioning when a traveler faxes receipts for imaging. Previously, if a traveler faxed only a portion of receipts initially, the traveler later would have to fax all the receipts because the newer version of the imaging would replace the first version. With the upgrade, a traveler can fax in receipts at different times and turn in imaging versions separately, Fearon said.
Necho Expense will allow the approval process to be blocked until receipt images are received. This will guarantee that supervisors have the necessary receipts when they approve reports, he said.
Although still relatively new, receipt imaging quickly is becoming a standard in expense management. It's a trend reported by all major expense solution suppliers
(BTN, Aug. 15, 2005), but Fearon said it has become dominant.
"All of our new business that is being signed today takes receipt digital filing," he said. "They want to do away with the paper, and they want RDF to be the standard in the organization."
It's becoming accepted globally, but Bob Langsfeld, travel management consultant for Corporate Solutions Group, warned it's far from universal. "Where the U.S. and the IRS will accept electronic receipting, certain parts of Europe will not," Langsfeld said. "We're in the front railroad car, and some European countries are with it."
Another key benefit is that the new version will cut implementation time, Fearon said. "We want to measure the implementation curve in days, not months."
Part of that rapid deployment ability comes from improvements to the corporate structure, which allows the expense report to flow through the system with no rekeying required, he said. While this can be complicated when companies have grown through acquisition and have multiple segments with their own sets of cost elements, Necho's new version is a visual rather than a purely tech-based structure to set up the corporate workflow.
A third major upgrade deals with the system's connectivity to such other systems as the corporate card, human resources or currency exchange rates, Fearon said. While such integration was available before, it's now run directly from a console in the system rather than outside the application.
Necho also enhanced the functionality of proxies—users that incur expenses but don't submit their own expenses, such as a plant employee who only travels once a year. New capabilities include allowing proxies to submit as well as create expense reports and administrators to determine who can be a proxy submitter, Fearon said.
Other improvements include a series of walkthroughs, the ability to add multiple attendees for an entertainment transaction and 14 new reports added based on client feedback, such as high-value expense reports and a top spenders report.