Happy Holidays – 2012!
2012 is rapidly coming to a close and we are excited about 2013.
On behalf of the entire team at Gorilla Expense, we wish you a very happy holiday season!
Archive for year: 2012
10 Ridiculous Items For Expense Reimbursement
Here is an interesting article from the Huffington Post on 10 ridiculous items for which employees tried to get reimbursement.The list is very interesting and diverse! Would love to hear your comments….
5 Business Travel Problems and Their Tech Solutions
Here is a great article from Mashable about 5 common travel problems how to solve them with technology. (Thank you Mike Murphy!)
“Although business travel is on the rise again, companies are expecting employees to wring even greater efficiency and productivity from their business trips. Unfortunately, even the most seasoned road warrior can run into hurdles when traveling for business…..
Read more here
Travel Policy Trends – by the GBTA
Our friends at the GBTA published a study on Travel Policy Trends: Control – what does it mean and who has it? Here is a teaser of the report –
“Travel professionals are playing an increasingly large and influential role in shaping and controlling business travel policy, aided by online booking tools and fueled by a growing focus on cost-saving efforts. This third annual study surveyed nearly 1,500 travel professionals in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America to determine, for the first time ever, what “control” over travel policy means to them and how travel professionals are adapting to new and evolving business travel requirements..
Highlights include:
•Who has the control over travel policy?
•What “control” over travel policy means to travel managers
•What travel managers are doing to adapt to new and evolving environments
•How travel policy differs by company travel spend
The full report can be found here
Finance Speak – ‘We lack visibility with our travel expenses. Please advise on how to tackle this’
(Finance Speak is a series where we discuss typical questions & concerns expressed by our customers. We will delve into each of the points and discuss the best way for the company to handle it. If you’d like to contribute or ask a question, send a message to info@gorillaexpense.com with ‘Finance Speak’ in the subject line.)
Executive (E) at a large manufacturing company – We have a sizeable mobile workforce. This mainly includes sales folks and purchasing managers who travel to meet with vendors and OEMs. We currently have no visibility into how we spend on travel. We have a very manual expense reporting process and travel expenses are approved without any due diligence. This leads to almost no visibility in where & how we spend. I would like to establish a process without rocking the boat too much. How do I go about this and what would be your recommendations…..
G – Do you currently have an established and well communicated process to manage T&E spend at all?
E – Not really. Some of the travel we do is last minute and there is minimal planning. After that, there is almost no reconciliation with the spend, not to mention our travelers take forever to send in their reports. The whole process pretty much runs open loop
G – Do you have a policies document for travel expenses? Do you know what your spend limits needs to be in a year?
E – We don’t have a policies document. We are paying more attention on how to budget our spend and making serious attempts to be within that budget. Some of these vary by projects so it does become a little hard to tackle
G – So, it sounds like managing spend by projects would definitely be an area of interest. It would also appear that you would like to automate this process as much as possible so that all stakeholders are involved. Would this be a correct assumption?
E – Absolutely! We would like for your company to guide us on how to setup a process and gradually automate it as we bring in more tools for the traveling folks. Can we connect this afternoon and discuss this in more detail?…….
This was definitely a very engaging discussion with our customer. Every company struggles with visibility into spend. Even the ones with a mature process. As companies grow their needs change and their tracking of parameters evolve – much more so for T&E because of the dynamic nature.
So what did we propose to our customer? We discussed many items but we recommended to take small steps that would converge at measurable goals over time. Due to the company’s culture, it made sense for them to not try too much at once. Here’s what we discussed –
T&E expense reporting process – We talked about the typical expense reporting process (See our website). This was a great way for them to start thinking about it. The key point was the importance of communicating this process and guidelines clearly & frequently to employees. After they looked at it, we helped them fine-tune it much more to meet their needs.
Expense reporting automation – A no-brainer really. This would solve several of the immediate inefficiencies and move them away from the manual process they have today. With this, their employees cannot make excuses for delays in submission. The other advantages are discussed below.
Policies for Expense Reporting – Our application includes setup of policies on various parameters. They were broken down into expense types for this company. This made a huge difference for them in being able to enforce limits. Here is an example screenshot –
Manager Approval – The application also has the ability for managers to view, correct, redirect & approve/reject expenses (See video). This way the right stakeholders were involved in the process and it wasn’t open loop anymore. The company setup a list of approving managers and specific employees to these managers for approval. Over the last few weeks, they have started creating additional layers of managers to review and monitor expense reports. A far cry from what they were doing a few months back!
Allocation of Expenses to Projects – We helped them track project expenses within the application. Project numbers are available to employees who allocate them to the report. We are working through the integration to their ERP system so that all these expenses are pushed to specific project accounts with no manual data entry. Their Accounts Payable manager now does more AP work instead of entering expenses!
T&E Analytics and Reporting – Finally, we walked them through our reporting and analytics engine that helps them slice and dice data to find out biggest areas of spend, expenses that were out of line, budgeted VS spent analysis, expenses by employees, expense types etc. so that they have better visibility on the where and how of travel spend. This has helped them review areas they would have never thought of looking at before.
End Result?
– The company now saves thousands of dollars per month by taking these steps
– The finance team has more details on travel spend
– Employees now submit expenses faster and they love the tools that have enabled improvements
– We helped them expand on their travel policies document when they had none
– The executive we interfaced with is loving his new approach and system having implemented all these steps without breaking the bank
While the company still needs to address other challenges, they are definitely on the right path towards tackling these tricky T&E problems one at a time. At the end of the day a big win-win for all!
Send us any questions or comments below or email us – info AT gorillaexpense
Gorilla Expense showcases T&E innovation at the prestigious DEMO Conference
We had a very successful exhibition of our T&E expense reporting solution at DEMO last week. DEMO is one of the biggest technology launchpad conferences in the US that provides a stage for young companies with disruptive and game-changing solutions. The event has been in existence since the 1980s. Some of the name brands that have emerged from DEMO include Salesforce.com, Tivo, VMWare and WebEx among others.
Microsoft selected us from several global companies and sponsored us to attend and present at this show (thanks again Microsoft!). It was great to receive kudos and recognition from someone like Microsoft. Our solid integration with Dynamics GP, NAV, AX and SL caught their attention and they wanted us to discuss the innovations we were making in T&E expense reporting – an old pain point that hasn’t been solved yet!
It was very exciting to fly out to SFO and showcase our solution in the heart of the Silicon Valley. We were also 1 of the 2 companies from Georgia. This is great news for the Southeast hi-tech scene. It puts Georgia on the map for hi-tech innovation compared to the bigger players like Boston, New York and of course the Silicon Valley.
We look forward to being part of the DEMO alumni and continue taking the pain out of expense reporting for companies and employees!
Contact us at info@gorillaexpense.com for more information. We love to hear from you!
Travel Policy Benchmarking – by the GBTA
The GBTA Foundation published a study on Travel Policy Benchmarking which was sponsored by Egencia, and Expedia Inc. Company. Here is a teaser of the report –
“Travel policy is the foundation of effective travel management. Organizations that implement and enforce travel policies can direct travelers and gain optimal value for each trip, and maximize returns from investments in travel. Organizations without effective travel policies lack the controls and information needed to optimize the value of their investment in business travel.
This report updates and expands the study of corporate travel policies and management conducted by the GBTA Foundation and sponsored by Egencia in 2010. The 2010 study clearly established the effectiveness of travel policy to help organizations minimize corporate travel costs. The 2011 study covers many of the same topics as last year’s survey, in order to track changes in travel policies and practices year-over-year. It also explores the way in which commercial travel buyers are grappling with the challenge of newly introduced ancillary fees and services. The objective of the two studies is to answer questions that many organizations have about travel policy, specifically:
• How their policies compare to the industry?
• Whether their travel policies are too short or too long, and whether they cover the right topics?
• If their travel policy strikes the right balance between the comfort and convenience desired by travelers, and
the cost control every organization needs?
• How are buyers changing policies in response to changing economic conditions?
• How are organizations responding to the fees for ancillary services that seem to comprise an increasing
share of airfares and hotel bills? ………………”
The full report can be found here
New Feature: Multi-Level Approval
By popular demand, Gorilla Expense has released a new feature where Multi-Levels Approvals of expense reports can be setup. The approvers can be designated as different types of users, viz. ‘Manager’, ‘Admin’, ‘Accounting’ etc. This feature adapts to a company’s existing work-flow. And similar to other areas, this feature can be customized by us to meet your specific needs.
Note that the Multi-Level Approval is different from the Redirect Expense Report feature. In Redirect Expense Report, the approver can redirect an expense report to someone else is he/she is unavailable. The Multi-Level approval is disparate but works in conjunction with expense report redirection.
With this feature, different departments within a company will have visibility into T&E spend. There is also enhanced accountability because people who need to sign off on expenses are now fully involved. Hope you enjoy this functionality!
How Gorilla Expense Enhances Microsoft Dynamics GP
Over the last few months, we have been interfacing with several companies that use Microsoft Dynamics GP. The inevitable question that we hear during the requirements phase is related to importing transactions from the corporate credit card. How does it work? Basically, a corporate card is provided to each employee and they are expected to enter/import expenses on the card within the reporting system. Once the expense report is approved, the data is pushed to GP. After this, the accounting department then does the reconciliation between the employee-submitted corporate card expenses and the card statement. If everything is correct, this should balance out. That’s the gist of it.
As we know, GP has an Expense Management add-on called eExpense. This provides online expense reporting and helps companies automate their expense submission process. But eExpense does not provide an interface for managing and tagging corporate credit card expenses. That’s where we come in!
Within the Gorilla Expense application, users can import transactions from their corporate card and even their personal cards. For this discussion, we will stick to the corporate card only. After the transactions are imported, our application allows the users to tag them with specifics – such as expense type, codes, projects, cost centers or account numbers. These fields are setup in the Gorilla application based on how it is setup in GP. The user can also split each card transaction into multiple cost centers. Once the compiling and tagging is done, the report is then available to the manager and finally the accounting folks to approve.
Once the approval is complete, the final ‘gatekeeper’ sends the transactions to GP using the Gorilla Integration Manager (GIM). The GIM is a very versatile & flexible tool that allows the gatekeeper to map specific parameters and fields to codes and accounts within GP. So, with the push of a button, all the transactions are available within GP and they have been tagged appropriately and immediately.
Our application combined with the GIM takes the pain out of importing and processing corporate credit card transactions. It is a “cannot live without” (actual customer quote) tool for accounting folks that cuts-down the processing time, effort involved and importantly data entry errors. So there you have it. A quick synopsis of the Gorilla Expense – Great Plains symbiosis!
If you have any questions or need assistance in implementing or customizing our application with GP, send us a message at info@gorillaexpense.com or 877.973.6737.
Benefits of T&E Automation
Over the last few months we have encountered numerous questions and discussions related to automation of the T&E process; specifically the advantages of automation. Here is a quick background of the challenges and synopsis of the advantages.
Some background
Surveys based on millions of expense reports submitted by 3,000 companies reveal that U.S. T&E costs are constantly rising. The largest increases were in airfare (up 5.7%), hotels (up 4.5%), and meetings (up 7.7%).
With T&E spend accounting for 7% percent of the total budget for the average mid-market company ($50 million to $800 million in revenue), according to recent Aberdeen Group research, the challenge facing CFOs and Controllers in this area is dramatic.
Scope of challenge
Fundamentally, most companies struggle to tackle these challenges because of not knowing where to start. Aberdeen’s 2011 report (Expense Management for a New Decade and The Mid-Market Expense Management Program) shows that:
* 56% of mid-market companies have limited visibility into T&E spending
* Less than 45% track their expenses via analytics and business intelligence in real time
* Only 33% leverage cloud-based expense management solutions and 28% integrate corporate card and expense management
* Just 15% provide T&E data to C-level executives for financial forecasting purposes
* Finally only a mere 6% utilize mobile expense management apps
Solutions for a new decade
The good news is that cloud-based solutions have significantly brought down the cost of automating T&E expense management. Solutions such as ours have been shown to deliver huge reductions in expense processing costs.
What steps to take?
1. Benchmark T&E costs against industry averages
2. Audit expenses against corporate travel policies with an automated expense auditing system
3. Leverage expense data to improve budgeting and forecasting. This data should allow companies to adjust travel policies to match realities and trends
4. Sign up for a cloud-based and mobile expense-management application. For example the up-front costs to get going with our solution is very minimal while being very economical to own
5. Integrate corporate card solutions (if a company has a corporate card program)
More than just cost control
Automating T&E does even more than just reduce costs.
* It makes it harder for employees to inflate expenses — and far easier for companies to detect fraud. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, up to 13% of company fraud arises in this area, so that’s a huge advantage.
* Expense reporting time is reduced and employees are reimbursed faster which is a major boost to morale. Automation results in an average 28% reduction in expense approval times and 27% reduction in employee expense report creation times according to the latest Aberdeen reports.
nefits of T&E Automation
Over the last few months we have encountered numerous questions and discussions related to automation of the T&E process; specifically the advantages of automation. Here is a quick background of the challenges and synopsis of the advantages.
Some background –
Surveys based on millions of expense reports submitted by 3,000 companies reveal that U.S. T&E costs are constantly rising. The largest increases were in airfare (up 5.7%), hotels (up 4.5%), and meetings (up 7.7%).
With T&E spend accounting for 7% percent of the total budget for the average mid-market company ($50 million to $800 million in revenue), according to recent Aberdeen Group research, the challenge facing CFOs and Controllers in this area is dramatic.
Scope of challenge
Fundamentally, most companies struggle to tackle these challenges. Aberdeen’s 2011 report (Expense Management for a New Decade and The Mid-Market Expense Management Program) shows that:
* 56% of mid-market companies have limited visibility into T&E spending
* Less than 45% track their expenses via analytics and business intelligence in real time
* Only 33% leverage cloud-based expense management solutions and 28% integrate corporate card and expense management
* Just 15% provide T&E data to C-level executives for financial forecasting purposes
* Finally only a mere 6% utilize mobile expense management apps
Solutions for a new decade
The good news is that cloud-based solutions have significantly brought down the cost of automating T&E expense management. These new solutions have been shown to deliver a whopping 46% average reduction in expense-processing costs.
What steps to take?
1. Benchmark T&E costs against industry averages
2. Audit expenses against corporate travel policies with an automated expense auditing systems
3. Leverage expense data to improve budgeting and forecasting. This data should allow companies to adjust travel policies to match realities and trends
4. Sign up for cloud-based and mobile expense-management applications. Typically, they don’t have huge up-front costs and are economical to own
5. Integrate corporate card solutions (if a company has a corporate card program)
6. Implement an end-to-end expense management solution
More than just cost control
Automating T&E does even more than reduce costs.
* It makes it harder for employees to inflate expenses — and far easier for companies to detect fraud. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, up to 13% of company fraud arises in this area, so that’s a huge advantage.
* Expense reporting time is reduced and employees are reimbursed faster which is a major boost to morale. Automation results in an average 28% reduction in expense approval times and 27% reduction in employee expense report creation times according to the latest Aberdeen reports