The companies are attempting to decrease their organization travel expenses without the need of, however, compromising anything from the way they file, manage and report their data. If something, they are requesting more granularity, modularity, and control without raising their IT overhead.
BAZ, a Procurement Management Software can be really helpful for your business in the management of raw materials that are going in and out of your company along with proper payments as keeping track of your raw materials manually can be really time-consuming and requires a lot of efforts.
So here is what the perfect T&E software program of the future should look like to cater to an increasingly choosy and sophisticated customers base:
1) Multi-Policy Capabilities.
Most companies these days do not have a clear business travel plan on paper. Even if they do, their T&E software program more often than not is designed for one particular "default" plan that is applicable around the board, from the CEO to the graphic designer in the multi-media department.
A great T&E software program would allow the managers to create various project accounts and then match up the expenditure reports against different plans entered into the system. Why should the Chairwoman of the Board be limited to the same room or rental vehicle allowance as the junior sales engineer who joined the organization only a few days before?
2) Open-Ended Horizontal Integration.
The T&E software of the future must be able to deal with not only the meals, hotel, air, and rental vehicle expenses like most standard T&E solutions do but other types of expenditures too like Internet and web-related expenditures, railway and sea journeys, training expenses, professional fees, and even medical expenditures, and so on.
The program must be open-ended enough to accommodate almost any expenditure categories without compromising anything from scalability or dependability.
3) Vertical Modularity.
The perfect T&E software needs to be modular enough to permit the managers to choose their own level of vertical integration in handling their organization's travel accounts.
For example, at the one end of the vertical integration spectrum must be the T&E expense submissions and reporting application alone.
On the other end, the program needs to be able to hook up with any hotel or car rental booking program, or credit card module, on one hand, and the company's Accounts Payable or Payroll modules, on the other.
With a software like that, a company will not have to pay for any pointless modules because the software is not going to come as a "take it or leave it" chunk.
Why must, for example, a company pay a high-end hotel-air-car reservation module if all travel arrangements already are made in-house? If a client desires just the bare-bones T&E functions, she should be able to get just that and save cash.
4) Platform Independence.
The perfect T&E software program should really be platform agnostic. That is, it needs to be able to run not only on any OS (Windows, Mac, Linux) but should be accessible with any device ranging from the classic desk-tops to PDAs and iPhones.
It must be browser-agnostic as well (IE, Firefox, Safari) so that it can be accessed through the Internet from any place on earth.
5) Zero Local IT Overhead.
The T&E program of the future must get rid of the need to buy high-priced software and hardware and maintain them locally. There should need to download any security updates or patches and no requirement to hire a team of highly paid technicians in order to keep the T&E servers operating properly 24x7.
6) Audit-Ready Compliance Ability.
We are living in a post-Sarbanes-Oxley world in which all publicly owned financial institutions in the United States are required to document their business transactions. Since under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 organization managers are personally accountable for unauthorized and improper expenditures in their departments, they take the need for consistent, safe and organized documentation very seriously.
A great T&E software program must thus generate detailed reports showing which travel requests have been accepted or rejected when and by which manager on the basis of which policy, and so on.
Tracking the expenses of your business manually can difficult as well as inaccurate as there might be human errors, which in turn might affect the profitability of your business. With the use of an Expense Tracking Software, the expenses of your business can be tracked much easily, quicker and without any human errors.
7) Secure, Distinctive and Time-Stamped Tagging.
It must also tag each transaction (which includes T&E related e-mail requests, expenditure filings, faxed receipts, etc.) with an encrypted, unique and time-stamped code to prevent scams and post-facto alterations.
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