"It was very cumbersome." That was management
accountant Terri Tweedy's assessment of the previous expense management process
used by her firm, Pharmacists Mutual Insurance Co. Employees had to fax copies
of receipts and mail the originals to the appropriate supervisor, who had to
reject the entire report if there were any questions, necessitating the
employee to restart the process.
Employees typically were taking three to five hours out of
their work week to submit expenses, Tweedy explained, and on average about 25
percent of them were more than 60 days late in submitting expense reports.
The property and casualty insurance company in September
2011 replaced its older version of Concur, which didn't include mobile receipt
capture, with Certify's Expense Management tool. With the new system, employees
are responsible for uploading receipts and classifying other expenses, such as
car mileage, either through email or the Certify mobile app. About 10
supervisors are responsible for approving expenses, based on how expenses are
coded. For example, expenses labeled "miscellaneous equipment" are
routed to the IT supervisor for review, and expenses coded as "sales
meetings" are routed to the marketing supervisor before reports are sent
to Tweedy for further processing.
The tool automatically creates expense reports. Pharmacists
Mutual configured Certify to create the reports on the 10th and 25th of every
month. Certify then sends employees emails notifying them that their reports
are ready. Employees verify expense categories, make any needed adjustments and
then submit the reports for approval.
Pharmacists Mutual has a total of 270 employees, of whom 80
have corporate cards. Of those, about 50 are field representatives across the
United States who "travel nonstop," according to Tweedy, and 20 are "heavy
travelers" located in Iowa, where the company is based. Pharmacists Mutual's
annual travel spend is about $1 million.
A year after implementing Certify, Pharmacists Mutual saved
$1,944 in postage and reduced its paper usage by nearly 6,000 pages, according
to Tweedy. The company reduced to five days from seven to 10 the average time
to approve and process expense reports.
"It's really freed up a lot of our time in accounting
because we can integrate the information into our general ledger," Tweedy
said. "Before we couldn't do that because it wasn't compatible."
Additionally, employees on average are taking about 90
minutes weekly to submit reports. Outstanding reports have also dropped to 1
percent. "We've seen a great reduction and it has remedied the problem of
late reporting," she said.
While Tweedy declined to share T&E savings figures since
implementing Certify, she said, "We've gotten better at keeping them to
their [spending] limit." The firm also can more easily assess whether
submitted expenses were actually personal and reject them.
Pharmacists Mutual now is looking into Certify's travel
component, which includes travel booking tools. It initially decided not to use
the tool because employees tend to book at smaller hotel chains, sometimes in
person. The firm uses local travel agency Algona Travel, but field reps mostly
are responsible for booking their own travel.
"They go on Priceline.com and book ahead of time or
they need to stop on the road somewhere," Tweedy said. "Although we
might consider it in the future if employees continually go over their limit."