Maturity involves a variety of factors. When it comes to Travel and Expense Management, different levels of maturity have different effects on your business’s ability to find and capture savings opportunities, reduce time spent toiling away on manual processes, and provide more time to salespeople and leadership to focus on giving value back to the organization, rather than wasting away planning travel, shoeboxing receipts, and waiting for reimbursement.
IDC’s Hierarchy of Travel and Expense Management Maturity
Respected research firm IDC took a deeper look into travel and expense management (TEM) software, developing a hierarchy of TEM maturity as part of a much larger study into the savings and opportunities gained by selecting a robust, mobile, mature TEM platform.
Much like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, each level of maturity in TEM software provides more value to organizations, from ‘gets the job done—barely’ to ‘actively benefits your organization.’
Level 1: Excel- or Paper-based Expense Reporting
Most small businesses start by manually entering their expenses into an Excel spreadsheet—which is time-consuming and error-prone. Automating can halve processing time.
Level 2: Automated TEM Processes
Companies usually then move to basic expense management software. That way, you can reconcile your back-office accounting systems with custom accounting codes—but the user experience leaves something to be desired.
Level 3: Purpose-built Mobile/Cloud Apps
These solutions immediately increase spending clarity across the organization by making it as easy as possible for users to update their expense reports on the fly and receiving timely and relevant travel alerts.
Level 4: Platform Ecosystem
Platform ecosystems can hook into corporate booking systems and travel management companies, and the platform can accommodate international travelers who need to account for value-added tax (VAT) as one example.
Level 5: Intelligent/Predictive Processes
Predictive analytics can look at historical data and highlight trouble areas for you before they happen again—and can help you set up warning flags to head off problems.
Finding Level Five TEM… In the Cloud
Looking at the savings you can gain (the IDC found an ROI of 482 percent, which means a level five TEM solution, on average, pays for itself four times over), these become even more apparent when you cut the unnecessary (sometimes hidden or unexpected) costs that go with on-premises software and find the standardized, predictable billing that comes with the cloud.
Learn more by downloading IDC’s Report, Drive Business Value through Travel and Expense Management Maturity, free from Concur.
Integration Takes You to Another Level
Organizations have been reaping the benefits of Concur for decades, but only recently did we find a way to take those benefits to the next level.
Three years ago, Brittenford released ExpenseConnect for Microsoft Dynamics GP, a secure and automated way to integrate data between Concur and Dynamics GP. Later in 2013, we expanded ExpenseConnect to Intacct, creating a cloud-to-cloud connector between the platforms.
This integration led companies to even more time savings and became us the highest selling App Center Partner (partly in thanks to our InvoiceConnect solution) in the Concur App Center.
The following Infographic shows you just how much this simple integration can benefit your business.
Learn more by attending a half-hour ExpenseConnect for GP Demo on March 24, watching this brief explanation of ExpenseConnect for Intacct, and learning about one of the many companies finding success with ExpenseConnect by reading the following case studies.
- Arizona Diamondbacks Hit Home Run with Integrated T&E/ERP
- Code42 Saves Big with AP and ERP Integration
- VAT Not a Problem for Grand Valley Fortifiers
- 30 Minutes Could Save You 10 Hours Per Week, Like it Did for Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau
- Project Management Company AtTask Gains Visibility with Integration
