5 Key Travel and Expense Management Trends That May Impact Your Organization
An efficient and streamlined travel and expense management solution can do wonders for the company. Aside from reducing costs, maintaining budgets, and ensuring compliance, a simple and convenient solution can also boost employee morale. Read more
The Newer and Cooler Mobile App for Expense Reporting
The new updated mobile app from Gorilla Expense brings with it several nifty features. The main goal with these features is to make it easier for travelers to submit expenses, for managers to approve expense reports, and reimbursements to happen faster. Here is a quick look at some of the key features:
OCR – The new and updated OCR makes scanning even faster and spits out the results more accurately. Of course, this feature is more commonly used with out of pocket expenses rather than corporate credit card expenses.
Splitting an Expense – If you have scenarios where expenses need to be split between multiple expense types / GL codes or between different departments or companies, in the latest version of the mobile app, the user can apply splits either ‘By Amount’ or ‘By Percentage’. The actual splitting process is applied via a simple guided wizard type process, so that it is intuitive and easy for the user.
Timesheets – This one is a biggie! If you have also signed up for our timesheet solution, then the user can also create and submit timesheets from the mobile app, making it a one-stop app to get both time and expenses done.
Touch ID – In the latest version the user has the option of enabling touch ID. This way you don’t have to remember any pesky passwords. (Just make sure to bring your finger along with you… Ha!)
With this blurb, we wanted to offer a quick view of some of the new features that have already been released. Stay tuned for more. We are playing with some cool ideas and plan to release more new features in the coming months…..
If you would like to see a live demo or have any questions, please contact us at [email protected].
Gorilla Expense offer an innovate spend management solution for companies of all sizes. The three main components of this solution are T&E Expense Reporting, Timesheets, and P-card Reconciliation.
While the solution is typically deployed as SaaS, Gorilla Expense also supports On-Premise deployments.
New feature: Bulk Edit of Expenses as a Manager
In the latest web version of Gorilla Expense, you will see a Bulk Edit option within the Manager Approval process. While reviewing an expense report, when you click on Edit Report, at the bottom right, you will now see a Bulk Edit button.
Once you click on the Bulk Edit button, it will open up the transactions section of the expense report in an Excel grid format, as shown below. This allows the manager to swiftly make multiple changes from one place.
The manager can easily tab through the cells, make changes as needed and then save them without having to open every single expense. This was one of the top feature requests from our customers and Voila! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach us at [email protected] or you can email the Support team at [email protected]
The Grand Vision: 100% AP Automation
The recent economic downturn, difficult credit situation, and increasing costs have all arrived together. For many companies, this has forced them to take a closer look at their internal processes as they seek ways to cut costs, improve efficiencies and increase bottom lines.
One area we are seeing a lot of interest in is Accounts Payable (AP) automation, with many companies striving to make it 100% automation.
100%-AP-Automation
For these companies, cutting costs associated with the AP process, automating it, making it less time consuming and providing panoramic visibility to decision makers in Finance is a no-brainer. Take the example of Zappos – restructuring their financial processes reduced their month-end closing process by 10 days. For a $1Billion company, that is huge!
So what are some of the key areas that CFOs, Controllers, AP Managers, Purchasing Managers are looking to improve their internal processes with relative ease while contributing to the organization’s overall mission to streamline costs?
Automation is the key to efficiency (and success)
Consider the inefficiencies in a non-automated, manual, paper-based process:
- An Aberdeen Group study found that it can take anywhere from 3.5 to 15 days to process a single invoice. (The industry average for 50% of companies is 11 days to process a single invoice. Yikes!). The cost of processing can range from $5 to $25 for a single invoice
- On the T&E expense report side of things, another Aberdeen report found that it can take anywhere from 3 to 22 days to reconcile and reimburse a expense report. The cost of processing an expense report manually is $35.28 versus $10.75 for companies that have an automated process
- This includes the costs associated with manual processing, shuffling paper between individuals and departments, exceptions processing, missing data/receipts, accrual delays, failed audits, duplicates, and late payment fees
On the other hand, the efficiencies gained by automating these AP processes produce results that are definitely dramatic. These include a:
- 92-96% reduction in paperwork
- Greater than 29% improvement in labor productivity
Another way to look at this comparison is even if you have dedicated data entry staff and devices to help with managing the manual process, you can typically process 1,000 documents (invoices & expense reports) a month per full-time employee (FTE). By contrast, automated and rules-based matching increases that number to 6,500-9,000 documents a month per FTE.
Conclusion: Automation not only brings significant efficiencies to the AP process, but also helps grow the business with existing staff. Basically, you can do more with less.
Control – at your fingertips
By automating as much of the AP process as possible, you get greater control and better visibility into spend. And this applies to invoices and expenses. While rules, routing, policies can be configured to unique company configurations, the biggest advantage is being able to review spend on an expense report or invoice in a timely manner. Not having to review every single transaction means there is more time to focus on important violations that require attention.
Automating the process also captures the document and additional data so that AP Managers have full visibility into the process. No more expense receipts or invoices hiding on individual desks. AP and Finance can now maintain a more real-time view of their corporate spend at any point in time, thereby providing more control.
Conclusion: Automation results in greater, not less, control over your internal Accounts Payable process.
But what if this is too expensive
There are many solutions that offer end-to-end AP automation using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model that require no upfront purchases. Choosing an AP solution that is offered as a service allows the company to truly pay-as-they-go! And with a typical SaaS model, the company can expect periodic upgrades and new features that add more value. This means companies can now reach their ROI much faster than before.
Conclusion: Automating the Accounts Payable process is more than ever available to a wider range of budgets.
Does company size matter?
Cloud-based solutions coupled with a SaaS business model offer a very low marginal cost to get started. With economies of scale and best practices, everyone benefits from automation. And, as discussed earlier, automation enables AP to focus on more strategic activities, such as, sourcing, reporting, spend analytics and vendor management.
Conclusion: Even small companies can save significant $$. Some research reports suggest annual savings can range from 4 to 17% of annual spend. Even for a small company, that can be big bucks!
How can analytics help?
Imagine now, you have all of this automation and data at your fingertips. How about a quick report on outstanding invoices for vendor ABC, LLC? How about a ‘spend to-date’ report on the AMEX corp. card for T&E expenses? Being able to massage the data and use it to arrive at meaningful conclusions is the key aspect of Analytics and Reporting modules. Providing such data to decision makers like AP Managers or CFOs provides tremendous value for the company to plan better, conserve money and be very strategic about growth. Several cloud-based solutions for Invoices & Expenses provide out of the box reporting and analytics that companies should definitely consider and incorporate.
Conclusion: With the amount of data churned out today, intelligent analytics is really a no-brainer. Smart companies utilize this data, make sense out of it and provide it to decision makers to really boost growth or drastically cut costs for companies. By paying attention to this, companies can put money back in their pockets.
Summary
It is very obvious to see that the benefits of AP automation are huge and cannot be ignored for the typical 21st century company. Let’s take a quick look at them again:
- Huge labor savings across the company
- Efficiency boost while processing Invoices & Expenses
- Reduced delays
- Improved transparency
- Panoramic visibility for decision makers
Whether the architecture is cloud-based and delivered as SaaS or an On-Premise Hosted solution, the move will get a company closer to becoming paperless. Automating and streamlining Invoices & Expenses will also provide a secure and serviceable archive for data.
Finally, process improvements can be realized in days, rather than months, resulting in a rapid ROI. This will leave the company with an end-to-end 100% automated AP solution that increases compliance, cuts costs, and reduces cycle times.
Now that’s a grand vision. But very much achievable!
Come See Innovation in Expense Management at Microsoft Convergence 2015
Convergence 2015, Booth # 1354
Microsoft Convergence 2015 is around the corner (3/16 to 3/19) and Gorilla Expense is excited to share several new features and updates for our T&E expense reporting solution. We will be doing live demos at booth # 1354. So come by, grab a seat and let’s chat!
Here is a quick recap of some of the new features:
- The new ‘never get in front of a computer’ mobile app
- Automated integration with Project module in Dynamics GP
- Do mileage expenses with integrated Google maps
- Ability to include multiple Dynamics NAV Dimensions
- The ‘FWD and forget’Â email feature
- Advanced cost center allocation capability (split expenses across multiple companies, business units and cost categories)
- Plus several other additions and updates
We also have a secret new product launch at Convergence 2015 which will make (hint hint) expense reconciliation for AP a breeze! That is all we can say at this time. But come meet us at Convergence and learn more.
We look forward to meeting y’all in ATL! Follow us on Twitter: @GorillaExpense #CONV for the latest updates.
–
Sincerely,
The Gorilla Expense Team
New Feature: FWD Receipts Over Email
On the heels of our recent and popular ‘track mileage expenses with Google maps integration’ feature we have come out with another zinger of a feature (currently in beta mode). This is the ReceiptFWD feature that is available on the web application AND on our mobile app (in the Email tab).
Let’s discuss the current challenge:
Users receive receipts in emails from Airline or Hotel vendors that they have to download and then attach -OR- have to save the email as a PDF and attach it to the expense transaction
Our solution:
Our new email feature (in beta mode) allows users to FWD an email that has a single PDF receipt attachment to a fixed email account (example: [email protected]). If there is an attachment in the email, the application will automatically insert that into the receipt box within Gorilla Expense.
The user can also enter keywords in the body of the email (like: ‘Expense Type Meals’, ‘Total $200’) and the application will enter those values in the expense transaction within Gorilla Expense. This way when the user logs in to the application, the transaction in complete. See below for an email example, where the user is FWDing an email with a PDF receipt and has inserted keywords for the application to complete the transaction.
Painless-Receipt-Scanning-and-Expense-Tracking
If the email does not have a PDF receipt attached and if the email itself functions as a receipt, then the user simple needs to FWD the email for the application to create a PDF of the body of the email and attach it to the receipt box in Gorilla Expense. Similar to above, the user can use keywords to fill in the other details of the transaction. This is especially useful since many airline companies no longer provide attachments. Below is an example of a user FWDing the email itself.
Submit-receipts-and-expenses-using-email
The benefit of this feature is that solves the pain of having to manage expense related data that can come in from another source, namely email. We expect this to make traveler’s lives a lot easier.
So, the next time you get ready to do your expense report, these transactions along with receipts are waiting in the mobile app or the web app, ready to be dropped into an expense report. Click – Click – 4 seconds and your expense report is done!
As always we love hearing from you. If you have any questions, we are here – [email protected]
Gorilla Expense – Our Story
We get asked about ‘our story’ at different times by different folks – customers, prospects, partners, new employees and even competitors! What is our story? Why are we doing this? Why now? Well, it is very simple:
Our team has been in the Travel + Expense Reporting space for many years with a combined experience of several decades. The backgrounds of our management team comes from working with / implementing / developing other T&E expense reporting systems like Concur, SAP, Oracle’s iExpense and other Goliaths in the past.
These are large companies with big legacy systems. And we fully understand what works and what doesn’t work with the solutions provided by these companies, which not only includes products but also support.
Learning from the mistakes of our competitors, we wanted to offer a solution that was nimble yet powerful in being able to handle all requirements ranging from a 20 user application to one used by our large multi-national customers. (And this caught the attention of Microsoft for their Dynamics ERP product line, when they sponsored us to attend DEMO – read more here)
But our focus is more than just the product – we also pride ourselves in providing exceptional support, where our competitors don’t do the best job. Every customer that signs up with us becomes THE customer for us while they may be A customer for our competitors, which is a big difference.
Our customers don’t just subscribe to our solution or buy our products – they approach us for advice and guidance to solve their challenges with expense reporting and support our mission. And we love solving their problems while putting a smile on the faces of their Travelers and Finance teams.
So, that’s our raison d’etre. As far as we know the T&E pain point hasn’t been solved yet. And that’s why we are here today – to finally fix it for customers like you and have fun while doing it! Hope you enjoyed this post and thanks for your support….
New Feature: Google Maps Integration for Mileage Expenses
By popular customer demand, we have released a new (and cool) feature where the application will automatically calculate the number of miles using Google Maps. For this, the user will need to enter the start & end locations on a map within the web application. Once selected, the application will calculate the number of miles and drop it into the transaction. Since we already pull-in the IRS defined mileage rate, the math to calculate the amount is complete! The application also saves the Start and End locations in the comments field for reference. Here is how it looks:
1) Open an expense transaction and pick Mileage expense type. There the user will see a Google Maps link. Click on it. In the next screen as shown below, enter the Start and End Addresses, then select on the ‘Import Mileage’ button
Mileage-Expense-Map
2) Once this done, the mileage expense type is complete as shown in the image below. As you can see, the application automatically imports the IRS mileage rate and does the math. It also adds the Start and End addresses to the Comments box. After the user clicks on Save, the transaction can be added to an expense report for submission.
Done… Accurately and in less than 5 seconds! And conveniently from within our application, without having to go to an external map application every time.
Mileage-Expense-Type
What do you think? As always, we love to hear from you – info@gorillaexpense.com
Two Sides of the Same Coin – T&E Expense Reporting & Payroll Integration
Here is a frequently heard request from Accounts Payable departments (AP) in companies around the world –
‘Can we integrate T&E with our Payroll system to issue reimbursements faster and error-free?’ And a very pertinent request at that – considering that AP is largely responsible for issuing T&E reimbursements.
A recently conducted survey, with results displayed below, showed that at least 74% of T&E reimbursements fall largely within the domain of AP. This becomes an additional burden to handle for AP among other important tasks. Plus, the ripple effects of delayed reimbursements or wrong reimbursements affects the heart of the business: the morale of the workforce. So it really is a no-brainer to automate this process through integration.
And this fits into the overall theme for companies in the 21st century which is – religiously examining ways towards becoming more efficient and effective at what they do. And on that list is frustration and delays with T&E reimbursements for employees after a trip. This is especially true after an international trip where the employee could have sizable out of pocket expenses with imminent due dates on their credit cards. Therefore integration of T&E and Payroll systems is paramount and companies are investigating in more detail on how to maintain a seamless integration between these two systems which are essentially two sides of the same coin.
Payroll systems look at an employee at one point in time, chiefly, what is that employee’s salary or hourly wage today. They automatically calculate net pay for a given pay period, federal, state and local taxes, deductions for such items as health care copays and contributions to charities etc. These systems also automatically cut checks to employees or have their pay automatically deposited into their bank account.
T&E Expense Reporting systems, on the other hand, help manage the employees expenses from a trip. If the company utilizes a corporate card, then the employee submits those expenses are part of the same system. The key pieces of the expense transaction includes details about the trip, expense type, vendor and mainly the receipt of the transaction.
The benefits of integration between these two systems are:
– Reduce reimbursement time
– No more manual keying of data in multiple places
– Utilize the existing flow and scheduling for T&E reimbursements
– Real-time visibility of reimbursement status for all parties
– And most importantly, the emotional aspect – employees expect the company to reimburse them for out-of-pocket expenses ASAP. And by automating the process as much as possible (which in turn reduces errors, delays and frustrations), it shows the employees that the company cares!
So how does this typically work?
The natural next step for T&E data after it has been reconciled in the expense reporting & ERP systems is sending it to the Payroll system. Think of it as ‘Passing the expense report data baton’!
