Snapshot
Organization: Kelly
Services
Industry: Temporary
staffing & workforce solutions
Headquarters: Troy,
Mich.
Annual Air, Hotel,
Car & Dining Spend: $15 million
Challenge: Booking
and reconciling hotel payments for nontraditional travelers on her own corporate
card left global travel manager Paula Flowers filling out cumbersome paperwork
on the front end and dedicating 20 percent of her time to clarifying opaque
payment data on the back end—not to mention her card getting shut down for
suspected fraud.
Approach: Flowers,
her preferred travel management company and AirPlus mapped out a virtual card
strategy and then involved Kelly Services' internal IT and accounting departments
to make sure the solution would streamline accounting's work, as well.
Solution: Flowers' card isn't
getting shut down, stranding travelers. And hotel billing reconciliation has dropped
to 15 minutes a month.
Kelly Services global travel manager Paula Flowers'
corporate card was shut down for suspected fraud six times from 2011 to 2013. Travelers
at the temporary staffing agency who didn't have their own corporate cards—including
infrequent travelers, contractors, temporary employees and recruits—booked
flights on a central business travel account. But Flowers was using her own corporate
card for their hotels. On any given night, as many as 60 hotel room nights were
on her card.
Kelly Services has workers traveling anywhere their clients
need them. "Things change all the time," said Flowers, and only about
20 percent of the hotels the company uses in a year are part of its hotel
program. Direct billing would require Kelly Services to apply for credit at
each vendor so it could pay later through invoice. Instead, third-party billing
to Flowers' card seemed expedient.
Pre-Trip Pain
The process had its own convolutions, though. When
nontraditional travelers called preferred agency Carlson Wagonlit Travel to
book a hotel, the agency would use Flowers' card, call to ask the hotel to fax a
blank credit card authorization form to the travel agency, manually fill out
the traveler details and Flowers' billing information and then fax it to
Flowers to sign. Flowers would then fax the form back to the hotel. "It
was a very labor-intensive process just to get the booking part done," she
said. Plus, about a third of the time, the fax confirmations were missing by
the time the traveler arrived for check-in, Flowers said. CWT worked as a
backstop on that issue by calling the hotels to ensure the fax was on file.
Post-Trip Gaps
About 300 trips worth of hotel charges hit Flowers' card per
month, and none of it included traveler names or any identifying data. The bill
often would name the hotel chain, but any given chain could have multiple properties
in one city, and various Kelly Services travelers could be staying at them. Advanced
bookings that fell outside the billing cycle—for example, a deposit charged in
May for a trip occurring in September—also made reconciliation tricky. "It
would be nothing to literally spend two weeks going back and forth trying to
analyze, figure out and allocate those transactions properly," Flowers added.
The Final Straw
Flowers endured this tedium for about five years, but when
the card started getting shut down, the picture got grim. It was all hands on
deck at CWT. "They had to find out who was using my corporate card that
night, then reach out to those hotels and provide another credit card so those
people wouldn't have trip interruptions or undue stress," Flowers said. "It
was quite the challenge."
That began in 2011, and in 2012, she learned about AirPlus
virtual payments. "This was something really new in the industry that a
lot of people hadn't heard of at the time," Flowers said.
Flowers, AirPlus and CWT met to determine how to move
forward. The group identified what data Kelly Services and CWT needed to
provide so AirPlus could process the payments and what data AirPlus and CWT could
provide to help Kelly Services reconcile the transactions. Flowers then brought
in her company's IT and accounting departments to develop an Excel report that
would eliminate the need to enter the 300 monthly transactions into the
accounting system manually. "It was a collaboration between CWT, AirPlus
and the different internal units so that it wasn't just streamlined for me but
also for the accounting department," Flowers said.
Kelly Services launched the AirPlus virtual card solution
for hotels in January 2013. The virtual cards pay for room and tax, which are
predetermined, and allow a 10 percent cushion for unexpected taxes and fees
that may not be listed in the global distribution system. Travelers pay separately
for additional charges like food and expense them later.
"It's a huge solution for us," said Flowers.
Though virtual cards still require fax confirmations, even the misplaced fax
issue has improved dramatically. "It's still a fax," she said, "but
the numbers have just dropped."
Now, when Flowers gets the AirPlus statement,
she pulls up the Excel report as a check. Generally, the report is 100 percent
complete, she said, or perhaps five out of 300 transactions are in question and
it takes her no more than 15 minutes to account for the charges. "Then it's
done. I email the electronic document to our accounting department and they can
pay the bill," she said.