After seven years of steady progress, nearly two-thirds of
polled companies have integrated payment and expense solutions and another 13
percent plan to do so this year, according to the 8th annual Business Travel News Expense Manager
Survey. About a third of represented companies—up from 23 percent last
year—have integrated online booking and expense solutions, according to 129
expense managers participating in this year's survey. About 10 percent of
respondents said they expect to integrate booking and expense this year.
While some early adopters of booking-through-expense solutions now can highlight the benefits of such integration, such companies as
Procter & Gamble continue to study how best to marry booking tools, card
and expense application, according to P&G travel intelligence manager Bob
Harris, speaking during Business Travel Media Group's Tech Talk 2011
conference.
"We want to get to that point" of integration,
Harris said. "We want to make sure we can take travel data, take expense
data and have not just standard reports but on-the-fly custom reporting on a
grand scale. We want our employees, business partners, leaders, sourcing,
finance and HR group to have access to data to be useful for cost compliance,
policy compliance, etc."
P&G currently feeds to its data warehouse data from five
key sources: satisfaction surveys, travel agencies, its expense reporting
solution, hierarchial structure and credit cards. "If we can tie them
together, it will give us some answers key to our key outputs," Harris
said.
Harris and colleagues in travel management have spent
considerable time mapping which of the various stakeholders within the company
need the data and why they need it.
Meanwhile, Liz Claiborne Inc. is one of the early adopters
on Concur's end-to-end solution, and Harman International married its IBM
Global Expense Reporting Solution with its booking tool. Buyers from both
companies talked during the Tech Talk conference about their ability to compare
booked data to expensed data, understand the variances and identify saving
opportunities and potential new polices.
While a number of standalone booking and expense providers
have partnered to promote integrated offerings, Concur, HRG, KDS and Rearden
Commerce have been the only travel companies promoting one-stop products.
Concur and KDS each own and offer integrated travel and expense products;
Rearden owns a booking system and ExpenseWire, and allows companies to plug in
other expense tools; and HRG offers online booking tied to the SpendVision
expense system. Enterprise Resource Planning systems such as SAP and Oracle
also offer expense applications.
The addressable expense management market is sized at about
$49 billion globally, with $4 billion for expense management systems and $45
billion for outsourcing services, according to a recent CWT Travel Management
Institute study.
While online booking solutions have been in the market for
more than 20 years—and more than 40 competitors now vie for enterprise, or at
least, frequent traveler attention—some companies continue to use homegrown
technology or even basic spreadsheets to manage expenses. Automated expense
providers most often cite Microsoft's Excel as its top competitor.
In a fall 2009 survey of 300 accounts payable professionals,
36 percent of respondents described their organizations' T&E expense
reporting environment as "paper-based." The results were published in
a study by the International Accounts Payable Professionals, International
Accounts Receivable Professionals and The Association for Work Process
Improvements, and sponsored by InterPlx Expense Management. That study found
that 75 percent of respondent companies provided corporate cards to travelers.
Similar to BTN's
latest study, 53 percent of respondents who said their companies had automated
expense systems indicated that corporate card data is fed to those systems.
Integration
Priorities Of Those With Expense Tools
In BTN's latest
expense manager survey, among those respondents who indicated their organizations
had an automated expense tool, about half (45 percent) cited integration with a
payment tool as a top priority. Integration with a corporate booking tool is a
priority at 40 percent of those companies, followed by integration with ERP
systems (35 percent), payroll (32 percent) and other company technology
solutions (30 percent).
The survey also asked buyers to prioritize the most
important expense management system features. More than three-quarters (77
percent) cited customizable reporting as among their top two priorities,
followed by receipt imaging (70 percent), auditing automation (60 percent),
online booking integration (53 percent) and mobile capabilities (49 percent).
Auditing More
Expenses
The BTN survey
also indicated that some companies had increased expense report auditing; 27
percent of respondents said their firms "audited a higher percentage"
of expense reports this year versus last year.
The majority—63 percent—said the audit ratio was unchanged,
but 26 percent of those respondents said that was because their companies
already audited 100 percent of all expense reports. Thirty-six percent of
respondents said the percentage was unchanged for other reasons and 1.7 percent
said their companies do not audit expense reports. Fewer than 10 percent of
respondents said their companies audited a lower percentage of expense reports
as compared to a year ago.
A number of expense system providers have recently announced
new auditing features or services as buyers highlight the need to more
carefully audit both pre- and post-trip to policy.