Labor Ready To Save Labor Thru Captura Data Capture
<B>Labor Ready To Save Labor Thru Captura Data Capture</B>
By Lynn Woods
When Michael Campagna, director of accounts payable at Labor Ready, joined the $1 billion Tacoma, Wash.-based temporary employment firm two years ago, the company already had in place a Visa one-card program, with T&E and purchasing expenses combined on a single piece of plastic. The challenge for Campagna was how to make the billing and expense reporting processes even more efficient.
One area in which he's achieved significant success is in the timely submission of expense reports. Since February, the company has gone from a compliance rate of 25 percent to 95 percent, thanks to Campagna's more aggressive follow-up approach to unsubmitted reports. Employees who haven't turned in their reports after 20 days of the transaction receive an e-mail from the accounting department. The key factor in the turnaround, however, was the "nasty grams"--spreadsheets listing names of employees who hadn't turned in their reports within the 30-day grace period--that the accounting department has been e-mailing to a handful of company executives.
Within the next two months, the company is rolling out Captura's Web-based expense reporting system to its 200 cardholders. In subsequent months, it also will make the online expense reporting system available to approximately 1,800 branch managers, who are manually submitting out-of-pocket expenses and mileage reports.
The new system, which is being initially tested with 50 users and is prepopulated with the Visa card expenses, "will save us a lot of labor," said Campagna. He estimated that he will be able to reduce the accounting staff by three people, once the implementation is complete. The ASP solution also relieves Labor Ready of the burden of having to purchase software or technically maintaining the system. Employees also appreciate the convenience of submitting expenses electronically, rather than by paper. "People are grateful to get off the manual system," he said. In addition to the standard training tools provided by Captura--consisting of an online Quick Tour and Web-based training--Labor Ready is providing an in-house Quick guide and is developing guidelines on idiosyncrasies in categorization of expenses.
Captura also will capture a lot more data from end users, Campagna said, leading to more compliance. For example, the system requires employees to indicate the business purpose of entertainment, who was there and other information required by the IRS. "Users can't finish the transaction until they have completed what I require from them," he noted.
Campagna is working with Captura to develop a database that would enable the system to assign the correct cost center to a transaction in Level II fields. Currently, Campagna and his staff preliminarily map expenses to the general ledger by manually assigning a cost center to each transaction. While the credit card SLC codes are generally cut and dry for travel, the codes for purchasing transactions, especially those made online and at large retailers, such as Walmart, are often vague.
One way Campagna has cut down on the time required to process reports is to limit his review to transactions of more than $300. For travel expenses, a "soft cap warning," notifying the employee that the expense is outside compliance, is generated for car rental transactions exceeding $1,000, daily hotel charges of more than $100 and per diems that exceed $30. "The expense goes through, and then at the back end I audit it," Campagna said. Less than 10 percent of transactions are out of compliance or of an amount high enough to require an explanation from the user, and of these, only 2 percent require Campagna's department to contact the employee for more information.
Another initiative Campagna is pursuing to cut costs is more use of Visa-issued ghost cards. So far, Labor Ready has given cards to five suppliers, enabling employees to order items without knowing the number. (The high-turnover rate in the company's branch offices and subsequent trust issues make Campagna reluctant to issue cards to more employees.) In each instance, a branch manager is assigned to oversee the vendor's use of the card and make sure all transactions are legitimate.
"We want to use more of these cards," he said. "We want to reduce lower-dollar transactions or one-time transactions with vendors, because that's the most costly aspect of a one-card program.