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Best practices for expense report processing are well known to ADMR readers. In a nutshell, these are: travelers use their corporate cards whenever possible; travel card companies pre-populate expense reports, which travelers view and annotate online; completed reports move through an automated approval chain before they reach accounting; and receipts for cash expenditures over a certain threshold are faxed to a processing center, where they are imaged for one-click auditing in payables and possible query by IRS.
Nonetheless, most accounting managers oversee an expense report approval process that is far from these best practices. Note that this process-what ADMR calls "real practices" for processing expense reports-is outlined clearly in a new survey from Business Travel News (BTN), an excellent trade paper. Background: This survey reflects practices at 236 companies, which break into the following categories: employs less than 1OO people, 47%, employs between TOO and 2,599,30%; 2,500 to 9,999, 9%; and 10,000 or more, 14%.
Full Automation is Uncommon
This survey shows that only 1 7.5% of survey respondents-about the same percentage as have 10,000 or more employees-have fully automated expense management automation (EAAA) systems. These big-ticket systems are available from such vendors as Concur Technologies, Geac, Gelco Expense Management, and Necho Systems. These offer the end-to-end, nearautomated processing of travel expenses that are encapsulated in best practices.
Key point: These EAAA systems also take most of the processing grunt work out of accounting, permitting staffers to focus on exceptions and managers to fine-tune travel and administrative policies.
Upshot: The accounting function at the remaining 82.5% of companies in this BTN survey manages expense report processing with a range of improvised or labor-intensive systems. These include: spreadsheets, 38.8%; paper-based processes, 33.5%; automated internal systems, 1 7.6%; email systems, 6.9%; and other, 3.2%. This means that 72% of these companies now use spreadsheets or paper to...