Electronic Records Management and T&E Expense Management Systems
Ugur Akinci, PhD
December 29, 2007
Every business process must be documented in such a way that the related information should be processed and stored safely, referenced and indexed with unique tracking IDs, and retrieved easily on demand.
Travel and Entertainment (T&E) expense records is an important concern for most business organizations. According to Aberdeen Group research, 5 to 20 percent of all indirect spending today consists of T&E expenses. The companies studied by the Aberdeen Group processed at least 1,000 expense related reports each month. Thus the savings involved in automating that process through a scalable and reliable ERM system is clear.
But a lot more than bottom line savings are involved here. Most public companies in the USA are also burdened with financial disclosures and SOX reviews.
A crucial part of satisfying such conditions in a competitive business environment consists of having a good ERM system in place. Such a system should be able to keep electronic records together with copies of any paper receipts; allow for strict compliance with expense policies and approvals by appropriate supervisors. It should of course also generate detailed enough reports to provide the managers with an effective planning and decision-making tool while leaving no information gaps for any compliance audits.
Such a system should be able to attach report metadata to the T&E expense record data for tracking purposes. The metadata may include the date and time of the transaction, the IDs of the persons filing and approving it, etc. And optical character recognition program can be integrated to store the images of any physical receipts (restaurant bills, airplane tickets, etc.) with the data itself.
Ugur Akinci is the Editor of Web2Expense, an online T&E expense solution that provides seamless and scalable Electronic Records Management. Visit www.web2expense.com for a free 30-day trial today.
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