Advent Of An Extensity Deployment

<B> Advent Of An Extensity Deployment</B>

By Lynn Woods

For the globe-trotting employees at Advent International Corp., a Boston-based private equities venture capital company with over $4 billion under management, the switch from manually submitting expense reports to using Extensity Inc.'s Internet-based automated Expense Reports will mean a huge time savings. The rollout to its 120 frequent travelers is scheduled for mid November.

In choosing an electronic expense report solution, "our goal was to find a product users would find intuitive and easy to do," said Joe Punch, director of worldwide information systems at Advent. "If we get a financial savings, that's great, but it's more important to make the process easier for our employees."

Extensity's Java-based solution has proved to be a perfect fit for Advent. Because of the company's technological sophistication, "there will be no learning curve," said Punch. Its 200 employees--half are based in Boston and the remainder are scattered overseas among 17 countries--routinely travel with laptops. Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is standard within the company, meaning implementation of the Java product, which is compatible with updated browsers, should be smooth and glitch-free.

"All travelers have global Internet access accounts," noted Punch. "They're used to dialing in from their hotel rooms." But Extensity Expense Reports goes further. As a stand-alone application that can be accessed offline, Expense Reports enables employees to review and complete reports while on the 26-hour flight from Singapore to Boston, for example. Punch said the flexibility to use the product either online or offline was a major advantage.

While Java is still somewhat of a novelty in some corporate cultures, at Advent it has become the standard language. Two years ago, the company had all of its nonfinancial applications written in Java, enabling it to maintain one company-wide database in Boston. "Given the geographical layout of the company, we made a decision early on that Java made a lot of sense," said Punch. "People love it. It's simplified lives, and employees can get reports fast."

Advent currently is installing e-room, a knowledge management system that enables employees all over the globe to share documents and other information without having to use e-mail, he added.

Punch, who learned of the Extensity product after reading several articles about its implementation at a handful of computer companies, began to shop around for an electronic expense report solution about 10 months ago. Advent considered two competing products, but chose Expense Reports because of the ease of deployment, said Punch. "Anyone with a browser can get on. The ability to centrally manage the application across the organization reduces the burden on our IT staff and ensures that all of our end users around the globe have up-to-date software."

Although Advent scrapped its corporate card a few years ago, with the adaptation of Expense Reports it has signed up for American Express, which will prepopulate the reports. Employees must still, of course, input an explanation of each expense for tax purposes. The Expense Reports system helps with the process by automatically prompting the user if necessary information is omitted. Advent's accounting department is coming up with business rules that will be incorporated into the product by the November rollout.

Another timesaver is the product's automatic currency converter, which is essential to simplifying the expense report process for a global company like Advent. Having the amounts in each report automatically converted to dollars will help standardize a function that previously, under the manual system, was a bit haphazard. "People would do calculations on their Excel sheets that weren't consistent," Punch said. "We have a standard report everyone's supposed to use, but some don't."

While Expense Reports defaults to the rate used in the credit card feed, Extensity's partnering with OANDA, a Web-based currency service providing real-time data on variable exchange rates, allows it to customize this feature. "A company can set the conversion time of exchange rates," said Elizabeth Ireland, Extensity's vice president of marketing. Many corporations, for example, prefer to use one average rate within a month-long period, which can be built into the product.

Once they've completed their reports, Advent employees send in receipts to the central accounting department via interoffice mail, a percentage of which are audited, noted Punch. At the back end, Expense Reports is integrated with Advent's accounting system, allowing for a seamless flow of data that further cuts down on errors and time spent in manually inputting information.

Currently, Extensity has 55 customers--10 percent of them international--for Expense Reports.

Recent enhancements to the product include the addition of items to help users calculate their per diem, along with other data. For example, Ireland said, "we have a packaged goods company that wants to collect a trade-dollar amount when the sales rep is making a call and negotiating with a supermarket.