The Hidden Costs of Travel Receipts, Even As Microsoft Dynamics AX Improves Expense Handling

Travel & Expense Management (TEM) solutions provide employees with features that automate pre-travel approvals, travel booking, submission of expenses and reimbursement. Companies also benefit from TEM solutions by gaining better management of their expenditures, as well as enhancing their ability to comply with industry and governmental regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).

 

You may be surprised to learn that there is an entire industry devoted to TEM solutions. PayStream Advisors, a research and consulting firm that assesses technology investments, recently published a report showing that more than 40% of companies still manage TEM-related processes entirely manually. 70% are manual in some portion of their process, e.g. reimbursement checks are written rather direct deposit.

This gap has created significant opportunities for best-of-breed vendors, since many ERP solutions are lacking TEM features, or they fail to meet customer needs. Fortunately, users of Microsoft Dynamics will find that ISVs do a good job of augmenting the functionality within GP, NAV or AX rather than replacing it. In fact, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 includes an Expense Management module that handles expense claim inputs, approvals, defined expense policies, credit card transaction imports and full reporting.

Even though more than half of the surveyed companies automate some part of their Travel & Expense processes (according to PayStream Advisors), more than 70% still require employees to mail in their physical receipts. This manual process is accomplished through inter-office mail, postal service or as many companies discover, via overnight delivery.  In these recessionary times, this is not the type of expenditure control most companies are looking for. Creating another expense, i....