Is  your  expense  report  process
creating  a  data  silo?

For most companies, expense capture is much bigger than tracking the travel spend for employee reimbursement at the front end. The data collected is utilized in the larger financial ecosystem, used for profitability measurement and modeling, billing to clients, projects and cost centers, and even compliance.

Often these back end processes are supported by a collection of disparate applications brought into the company over time. As standalone systems, they do a great job, but once the data is needed elsewhere, things can fall apart. Manual steps become the norm opening the potential for errors and guaranteeing bottle necks.

Follow the money before choosing an expense management application. Understand where and how your company uses that information – all of it. In doing so, you’ll create a valuable requirements list aligned with your company rather than to a single department.

Use that information as your road map to vet the available software. Make sure it has the hooks needed to support your other mission critical processes and automates key points in your workflow.

Think of expense reporting as a ‘source of truth’ for your company. The data is too valuable to stay locked away in a silo. It has the potential to bring efficiencies and accuracy to other applications and help with strategic business decisions.