"Expense is the gateway that everyone must pass
through," said Steven Mandelbaum. "If you want to have control over
your program, you need to have control over your expense system." And The
Advisory Board Co., of which Mandelbaum is vice president of information
systems, has taken control by creating its own system, ExpenseNow, for desktops.
The Advisory Board wanted an expense tool that serves its
policy, from a ban on Uber's Black tier to active management of unused airline tickets.
To that end, Mandelbaum found some expense tools on the market constraining. "We
have tried to customize and configure them to work the way we wanted, but
ultimately we always came short of achieving our holy grail. We thought we had
a better approach. ... We also wanted to do away with the expense report."
He noted that an expense report offers no way to ascertain
whether a given expense is part of a particular trip. "What you really
want is to take a look at all expenses together," he said.
How It Works
The Advisory Board worked with a technology firm over eight
months to develop ExpenseNow and launched it to employees in October. Travelers
access the tool and all other content on the company's internal network via a
single login. The new platform, he said, "works like Gmail," in that
employees have one inbox of all of their transactions.
About 80 percent of transactions are pre-populated into the
system from employees' corporate cards, Mandelbaum said. Then, employees choose
a purpose for the expense from a drop-down menu of meetings from Salesforce. "We're
only going to show you probably three to four dates depending on the date of
transaction, not all of your 20 meetings in a month. The list will change
depending on the date and type of expense," he explained.
Just as the traveler has a collection of expenses to
allocate, the approver similarly has an inbox of expenses to approve, with noncompliant
expenses showing in red. Managers can filter to view all of a single employee's
hotel expenses to "see anything that looks weird." They also can display
all of an employee's submitted expenses to date in one spot.
The tool also allows the approver to do "retroactive
audits," viewing, for example, one traveler's spend for the past three
months. "One transaction or one report is usually difficult to do an audit
on," Mandelbaum said. "Sometimes travelers break policy, but if you
look at totality, it makes sense."
Uber & Other
Benefits
The tool also integrates with Uber to display a ride's cost,
pickup and drop-off locations and class of service. "That's something that
would take years if we'd put it through one of the other providers," he
said. Other suppliers also integrate with Uber, but the data Concur receives,
for instance, does not include locations and class of the ride, according to a
Concur spokesperson; that information is visible only on the traveler's Uber
account. But such information matters to The Advisory Board, which prohibits the
higher-tier UberBlack. ExpenseNow, which provides a way for a traveler to note
if UberBlack was the only option, enables approvers to follow up with others
who took that service.
While Mandelbaum couldn't reveal the exact amount the new
tool saved, but he said, "We did really good year-over-year." He
added that employees have said they can submit expenses four times quicker and "absolutely
love it." And because travelers submit expenses more frequently, The
Advisory Board has more accurate and timely spend visibility. "Most
expense systems speed up the process by simply requiring less detail," he
said. "We took a different approach since having more data and details is
key to optimizing our travel program. We get more detail in a fraction of the
time." He added, "The best thing about [the tool] is that we can
bring in lots of data sources and then tailor the policy based on the data,
which is unique."
How It Will Evolve
The Advisory Board will continue to build functionality and
integrate additional systems and suppliers directly with the expense tool to
create "one unified digital umbrella [that] will allow us to do stuff that
others can't do," Mandelbaum said. The Advisory Board is focused on an
unused-airfare initiative, and will look to an uncommon expense system
configuration to help provide visibility.
Mandelbaum said the company will transition to a central
bill or ghost card for air transactions, which he calls "a very powerful
tool" that will help control the timing of when the airfare charges
actually hit the expense tool. "I don't necessarily
want every transaction to be accounted for," he said. "Sometimes I
want to wait until I know more about the transaction, and sometimes I want to
reshape the transaction."
For example, if a traveler cancels
a flight, Mandelbaum wants to integrate airfare transaction data with travel
management company data to confirm that the traveler actually took the flight
before funneling transaction data into the expense system. "It will help
with unused ticket management, help us capture change fees better and help us
reallocate [tickets] to other travelers where it makes sense," he said.
Likewise, if a traveler buys a
plane ticket and expenses the flight, but doesn't go on the trip and instead reschedules
the ticket for a separate trip, the second trip's flight cost will look artificially
cheap, he noted. Delaying the transaction data until the ticket is actually
used will help The Advisory Board get a more accurate read on total trip cost.
While the company gets hotel data from
MasterCard, Mandelbaum would like to work with certain hotels to pull direct
data into ExpenseNow. His company also will link its compliance-focused
internal rewards program to the expense tool.