Every business trip begins with travel requisitions and ends when all expenses are reimbursed. And those expenses can add up, representing a typical organization's second largest controllable expense. So doesn't it make sense to manage your entire business travel process within one seamless solution. More and more organizations are to do just that. Employee Expense Management helps companies streamline all aspects of their travel and business expense spend.

As per an American Express Study - over 500 Indian Companies - this year  "Travel and entertainment (TE) remains the second largest controllable operating cost after salaries and benefits."

PwC global study -  "India is most prone to Frauds, with particular weakness on Internal Frauds".  It also highlighted how very little is being done by Management to address this.

Employee Expense Management actually helps your organization control spend - from the time travel is procured all the way through to payment and reporting - by driving compliance and enforcing your policies. Organizations that still manually process expense reports can spend up to Rs. 500 or more per expense report transaction. Travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses comprise of up to 10% of an average company's operating expenses*! With this much at stake, automation is not only considered a best practice, it also:

• Save 10-15% of Indirect Costs by reducing inflated claims
• Save 10-20% of Expenses by enforcing entitlements and policies
• Get 20-25% savings through lower rates from your suppliers
• Save 50-80% of processing time!
• Reduces the cost of every expense report transaction by up to 70%

Employee Expense Management streamlines and automates the expense reporting process for organizations of all sizes. Our solution eliminates the manual, paper based process of managing expense reports and enables employees to quickly create their expense reports, and supervisors, A/P managers, auditors and senior management to easily review, approve, process and audit expense reports. This makes creating and submitting expense reports simple and quick for employees, resulting in high user satisfaction and a rapid employee adoption rate.

The system will Reduce the Cost of Processing the Vouchers, improve Turn Around Times and Improve Employee Productivity. It will help organizations Reduce Expenses and Streamline Processes.

Business Rules Mapping

Business Rules Mapping ensures that your organisation structure and business rules are mapped into the system.

Since the system is highly configurable, it typically enables you to automate your processes with minimum changes to the Employee Expense Management solution.

Be it your employee lists, account code lists, cost center lists, tax structures, vendor lists, bank accounts, or payment modes - they are all configured into the system with ease. In addition, a powerful security and access rights management module ensures that the right people can perform their functions, with no risk to data confidentiality.

This process of defining business rules often involves reading data from other systems in your organisation. The solution integrates with your systems to ensure you do not have to key in data in multiple systems, and instead you can reuse the data which already has been set up. Whether it is SAP, Sun Accounting, Oracle Financials, or others ? the data is seamlessly integrated.

Workflow Configurator

In your organisation the most critical process to define and automate is the delegation matrix for approvals.

In the absence of a delegation matrix, the CEO or the CFO would need to approve and sign every bill!

Rules for who can approve what expense vary from company to company - and they change from time to time. Hence Employee Expense Management is designed in a way to give you flexibility in defining these rules.

For example, in your organisation, all approvals are based on expense amount limits - where upto Rs 5000 you would like a branch manager to approve, while for higher expenses you may require two approvals.

In another organisation the rules could be based on seniority of the person filling in the claim - where a senior person?s claim requires only one level approval, while others require multiple levels.

Another scenario could be where in department to department, the rules vary - for example, for the sales department, the rules for expense approval vary from that of the support departments. In many organisations, the delegation matrix is more complex - where it is based on amount of expense as well as account code. So for each type of expense, as well as amount of expense, the persons who need to approve, vary.
In all these scenarios you need a flexible configurator which can enable you to configure these rules easily.

This is what our Workflow Configurator allows you to do.

Since is it very much configurable, it saves you precious time and cost to implement an expense management solution.

Business Expense Claims

For a company which employs, say, 500 employees, you could be receiving anywhere from 500 to 2500 claims per month, just from employees for their ad-hoc expenses. These Expenses could be pertaining to:

• Entertainment
• Books & Periodicals
• Mileage Reimbursement for Vehicles
• Vehicle Fuel, Repair, Parking & Toll
• Office, Engineering or Other Supplies
• Maintenance & Repair of Equipment
• Postage, Shipping, Courier, Freight
• Local Conveyance, etc.

This process of submitting expense claims, approvals, and reimbursements gets streamlined with Employee Expense Management. This makes it easier for your Finance teams, as well as employees.

The visibility that you get into spend patterns of miscellaneous items helps you reduce costs.

Since business expense vouchers are often many in number, but of lower amounts, they require an MIS reporting system which gives granular MIS as to what expenses are being incurred by whom, in which location, for what account codes, in what time period.

Entering a business claim:

Employees get an easy to user console in which they can quickly create their expense claims, with minimum typing in.
They can give details of the expense ' right from when, where, how much and why.
They also get help to fill this in, with use of calculators, or being able to refer to the Expense Policy.
They can also attach supportings where applicable. Alternatively, employees could print out the expense form and physically attach supportings to send to the headoffice. Since the reference number of the expense claim form is available it is easy to link the paper document to the electronic form.

Approvals:

The approval rules set in the workflow configurator automatically route to the correct managers, and inform them by email too.
Managers can view and track all such claims which are awaiting their approval, and quickly approve.
Since cost centres and budget codes are allocated, they have full visibility into how this expense is going to be accounted for.
The senior most managers do not need to approve every single voucher, thanks to the approval rules.




Finance Verification:

The finance team starts verification and approvals after the voucher is approved by the business managers.
Hierarchy of the finance team, and who should approve vouchers of upto what amount are defined by you.
After finance approval, the claim is ready for disbursal.

Disbursement:

The employee can specify his preferred mode of payment : salary account, cash, credit card account, or expense account, for example.
The payment in charge can view all claims which are pending payment, and specify the payment details.
The payment voucher is now ready to go into the Accounting system.
In addition, for Electronic Fund Transfers, the system generates the necessary instruction files.

Integration with your Accounting System / ERP

NEXSTEP Expense Management provides an integration layer which makes it easy to integrate with your accounting system.

You could integrate with various systems like SAP, Oracle Financials, or SUN Accounting,amongst others.

This offers you the benefits of:

• you save time in creating accounting entries

• you leverage your investments in the Accounting System you own

• you ensure that data is not re-entered, if it exists in the Accounting System, thereby simplifying the management of master data.