The Key to Efficiently Monitoring Travel & Entertainment Spend

Travel and entertainment (T&E) accounts for 10–12% of the total annual budget for business expenses, according to a report by J.P. Morgan. This means North American companies will spend a projected $186 billion on T&E in 2015. It goes without saying: an expense category of this size should not be neglected. But how do companies monitor T&E spending and ensure employees submit timely expense reports?

Companies of all sizes employ different methods of monitoring T&E. For example: there are enterprise corporations compiling reports using complex spreadsheet formulas, but there are also startups using expense management software to keep tabs on spending in real time.

Ultimately, automated monitoring is the most accurate way to keep T&E spending in check, regardless of company size. With a cloud-based software, managers can run reports for their teams, compare expenses between two sales representatives, or see how T&E spending measures against closings. Accountants can access reports showing monthly reimbursable expenses across the business, categorized by pre-defined parameters. Executives can see top-level numbers in a broad range of dissectible reports. While all of these reports may be effectively created with spreadsheets, automating the monitoring process frees up valuable time and eliminates error-prone data entry across multiple departments.

In our annual expense management trends survey, we ask a broad range of finance professionals about the largest pain points surrounding T&E management. Last year, the number one pain point was “employee failure to submit reports on time,” according to 39% of respondents (and in 2013, 46% of respondents). How can companies alleviate this recurring pain point? You guessed it: automation.

True automation means expense reports are built automatically (thus, on time) for users to simply review and submit for approval. When a cloud-based, automated system is in place, employees are prompted and reminded along the process—which significantly reduces expense report tardiness.

Tracking your Expenses Won’t be Hard Anymore

We generally come across with many expenses in our daily life. For an individual it may be easy to calculate his expenses, but when coming to a company or an institution or a business it is hard to calculate the expenses at a time. It is hard to keep the details of the expenses on finger tips. And for this reason we can go for the expense reports. Here, in the expense report all the expenses of the company or the business organization are listed and are organized in an efficient manner. These expense reports help you greatly in your accounting.

In the past we had accountants who write the accounts and they prepare the reports. And in those days the reports were typed. At present, we have various ways to generate the expenditure details. You can use any one of them to generate your report.

The various methods available in these days to represent your expenses are: The basic and the simplest method to represent your expenditure are by making the use of the expense report sheets. These are popularly known as the spread sheets, these help you a lot in representing our expenses and for calculation of your expenses. These spread sheets are easy to use, but the only limitation of these spread sheets is that there are limited features in this.

And the other method that you can use to generate your reports is by using the online services. You can represent your expenses through the web based expense reports. These are easy to use and also these offer more features than the spread sheets.

The other method to generate spreed sheet is by using the software. You will get this software with all the required tools in it and hence there is no need of using many applications to generate your expense report. You can choose software for your company or for your business. You can follow any method to generate your spreed sheet and to calculate the expenses.