The Best Travel and Expense Reporting Solution
Concur
Our independent review for Travel and Expense Management selected Concur as the best option, particularly because of its advanced features, and excellent track record. Concur has a large market share, with over 60% of the Fortune 500, top security measures, and a very strong mobile solution that supports travelling staff.
The Travel and Expense Management Shortlist
What To Look For
Travel and Expense Reporting software help you manage corporate expenses, by improving visibility and processing. Get rid of spreadsheets and handling paper receipts, by automating the planning, capture and processing of expense reports and travel information.
Expense reporting features
Look for solutions that cover:
- Receipt scanning
- Data entry
- Automatic processing (or human verification) to convert receipts into categories, dollar amounts, etc.
- Ability to categorise, tag and add comments
- Itemization of expenses
- Ability to split amounts between staff or days
- Support for all of your common expense types
- Support for mileage - trip / distance / rate calculations. Some solutions also offer mobile integration with maps / GPS to automatically calculate amounts.
Advanced travel functionality
Expense management is often closely related to travel. You may want to consider travel management features alongside a new expense management solution. If this is something you're considering, look for:
- Travel booking - automated workflow to manage travel requests and approvals
- Integration with your corporate travel management suppliers
- Manage an entire trip's travel expenses
- Hold a travel itinerary, with mobile access, to help travelling staff
Administrative functionality
I recommend you review solutions for:
- Automated workflow and approval
- Reporting that equals your existing needs. Also look for some value-added reports, like identifying over-spenders and frugal staff
- Integration with your existing accounting and sales management systems. Also, look for a fully-featured and well-documented API, with flexible integration technology to build your own custom integration
- Audit of expenses, and fraud detection tools
- Automatic categorisation of expenses to reduce administrative overheads
- Automated payment / reimbursement
Questions to ask your vendor
- What mobile devices do you support? Look for full apps for your preferred devices (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, iPad, etc.), that support the entire set of functionality - data entry, reporting, approvals, and camera integration to photograph receipts.
- Are you compliant with tax / government regulations in my country - particularly, make sure you understand whether you need to retain a paper copy of receipts.
- Do you integrate with corporate suppliers to automate the ordering process (e.g. travel management)?
- How secure is your solution? Look for independent security certification, and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance where required
