Aberdeen Group’s T&E Expense Management Automation Report reveals a number of very interesting findings about the benefits of expense management automation for organisations. An interesting overarching insight is that expense management automation alone- excluding timesheet or project management automation- yields very high cost and risk savings for organisations of all sizes. Our experiences in the SMB space support this.
The Aberdeen report revealed a segment of companies that they classified as ‘Best in Class’ companies. These organisations distinguished themselves from industry average or laggard companies in a few ways:
– Their cost to process expense reports was 73% lower than their competitors
– Compliance with T&E policies was 36% higher than their competitors
Best-in-Class companies were able to complete expense reports in 24% less time than average or laggard organisations. This means that costs to process expense reports among Best-in-Class organisations was 3.7 times lower than their counterparts. And, it is possible for them to reimburse 34% faster than these competitors.
This means an immediate cost saving to a ‘Best-in-Class’ the organisation of 3.7 times that of competitors for these tasks! Not to mention the benefits to staff morale and administrative time savings internally. And what’s more, the team can now focus on important activities like servicing your customers instead of doing administrative tasks.
Our personal experience of implementing an online time and expense management system at one of our businesses supports this. The company has close to 50 consultants operating across five offices. We found that implementing a time and issue management solution made a massive difference to the time that the team spent completing timesheets and tracking issues weekly. In addition, the flexibility of consultants being able to update this system from anywhere any time was invaluable.
Instead of timesheet updates becoming a ‘weekly event’ for consultants, with a high error rates, consultants were able to update their timesheets automatically by completing time against issues on a daily basis. This encouraged them to update their time throughout the day/week. In addition, there are validations to ensure that time was entered against the correct project, issue or activity- an additional time saver both at the front end and back end.
There are a broad range of cost effective solutions that exist to help both small and medium sized businesses in expense management, project management and timesheet automation. Talk to Software Shortlist or use our services to assist you in finding the right solution for your specific needs.
About the Author
Craig Westcott is a co-founder of Software Shortlist and also works as a consultant within the software and technology sectors. His experience includes consulting, sales, management and strategy for blue chip organisations and tier 1 consultancies over the past 15 years. Most recently he was responsible for launching two businesses for a fast growing consulting company, Fusion5.
