Gelco To Enhance Global Per Diem, Currency Tools

Gelco Expense Management is expanding its services to global clients, including new support for such complications facing clients with European offices as handling per diems and currency usage, the company announced Wednesday.

The Eden Prairie, Minn.-based expense management supplier said the additional features to its GlobaLink capabilities would be available in the third quarter of this year. Besides the improved applications for per diems and currency usage, the enhancements also will assist with multi-vehicle usage, corporate card integrations, additional languages and toll-free fax imaging. The enhancements were designed to help companies with compliance, business standardization and productivity.

"We needed to be able to accommodate more challenging local business policies and be able to maintain more accurate records," said Troy Thibodeau, Gelco's vice president of marketing. "We've made some real enhancements to what we're offering."

Prior to the enhancements, Gelco's solution did not always optimize its clients' local policy needs, Thibodeau said. A number of European countries, for example, each have their own laws regarding reimbursement rates and per diems. Such countries as Germany and Austria have travel allowances that are dictated by law and are dependent on such minutiae as the time of day the traveler leaves on the trip. Likewise, the United Kingdom has its own laws regarding fuel reimbursement, dependent not only on the distance traveled but also the type of petrol used, Thibodeau said.

Most multinational companies have offices in at least five countries in Europe, so keeping up with expense regulations is a challenge, said expense reporting solution providers. Even with the proliferation of the euro, differences in currency and such other expenses as value-added taxes further complicate the equation, said Bob Langsfeld, travel management consultant for Corporate Solutions Group.

However, global companies also are under increased pressure to control and account for travel and entertainment spending, not only from Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements in the United States, but from laws within other countries as well. At the same time, privacy issues are coming to the forefront, Langsfeld said.

"There has been a lot more scrutiny of data integrity and confidentiality in Europe," he said. "Protection of data is a very important thing."

Gelco is not the only expense reporting supplier to address multinational reporting issues. Redmond, Wash.-based Concur Technologies, for one, has addressed the per diem issue. "The tools have to be able to support these travel allowances," according to Tim Fitzgerald, general manager of Concur's Europe, Middle East and Africa operations. "Concur supports just about every country in Europe."

Likewise, Necho, a division of Parsippany, N.J.-based Cybershift, long has been established to handle expense solutions on a global scale, said Craig Fearon, Necho's senior product director. Because the software is developed in Toronto, it's already designed to handle Canada's complex system of taxation and therefore easily can handle such issues as VAT recovery and benefits-in-kind in the United Kingdom and Australia. Oftentimes, the VAT recovery alone pays for the expense reporting system, Fearon said.

Companies can set up different reimbursement policies unique to such countries as Germany within Necho's solution as well, he said. "We can handle it all in one software package," Fearon said. "Often, people add in their Canadian division first, then go to the U.K. and then go into Europe, country by country."

The increase in company and regulatory policies in the United Kingdom, Germany and France were part of the impetus for the enhancements to Gelco's GlobaLink capabilities, according to Gelco president and CEO Karen Beckwith. Companies also increasingly are looking to standardize operations across their organizations, another factor driving the enhancements, she said.

Even prior to the enhancements, Los Angeles-based real estate investing firm Colony Capital had used the company for its global expense reporting solution. The primary need was the ability to reimburse employees in their local currency, said Jon Halvorsen, the company's vice president of information technology, in a prepared statement. Deploying Gelco's tools globally "gave us central management and central administration," Halvorsen said. "With Gelco, we have the same expense reporting system in all our offices around the world, and our employees follow the same guidelines across the company."

Within the past year, Gelco already has seen enough interest in multinational expense reporting capabilities to establish offices in Europe in order to assist with implementations and other issues. It primarily had been servicing them out of its North America offices previously, Thibodeau said. The GlobaLink enhancements follow that trend, adding extended global client support, local payment services and office support in the United Kingdom.

Individual countries have companies with expertise on their own local travel regulations, Thibodeau said. With its enhancements, however, Gelco claims to be the sole business provider that offers a single-instance solution that lets a company localize disparate processes into one global solution and offer an integrated solution for payments.

"Local players cannot accommodate the breadth of different policies," Thibodeau said. "Other companies can handle some of the scenarios, but they don't make it as simple for the filer."