Expense Reporting vs
Expense Management

The improvements of automation over manual paper-based methods can be significant but to get the most benefit, you must look for the fine print. Where is that? It’s the point where tasks are connected together into groups representing a process – all rolled up into a workflow.

Connecting and automating discrete tasks together has far reaching benefits and for business travel and spending, it’s the difference between expense reporting and expense management.

The former results in a data silo of sorts while the latter shares information across the financial ecosystem aiding in decision-making both long and short-term.

On the surface, it seems logical to automate a single task or application. Make it faster and the results more reliable. That is an improvement. But expense data, like data resulting from many other tasks, is used throughout the organization, regardless of how it’s collected.

Automating just the expense report can short-change the potential overall benefits. Just like automating the CRM system for the purpose of only collecting contact information isolates the data which is enormously valuable to other systems. Need a combination of client names and their projects to bill back expenses? That’s only one example of the power behind automating and connecting processes. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

It’s easy to make a case that all tasks should be connected in some way to maximize their value but of course that’s not a practical starting point.

Follow your expense report data to reveal a roadmap indicating other processes in the organization
where automation can bring efficiency, improvement, and positively impact the bottom line.