Here’s How IT Can Reduce the Costs of Expense, Travel, and Invoice Management

IT teams at many companies are under intense pressure from all sides. Every day, company leadership has expectations of cost savings and greater efficiency. Users demand the same digital tools and capabilities at work as they have in their personal lives. Still other departments want greater visibility into budgets and analytics. The job of IT leaders becomes a tightrope walk of creating a unified strategy that benefits the business in the face of all of these demands.

This is especially true when it comes to expense, travel, and invoice management. Each of these needs have solutions that are unique, yet interconnected in their outcomes. Forrester recently surveyed nearly 400 decision makers at companies around the globe to learn exactly how they are currently managing expense reporting, travel, and invoicing – as well as how they can improve. The findings from Forrester are a great model for you to follow when choosing a solution.

Automation is key to ease of use and accessibility

Less than 45% of respondents were happy with how easy to use their travel and expense solutions were and only 37% were satisfied with invoicing. What Forrester discovered was that manual and unreliable processes were often the source of these frustrations.

This is where new technologies can help. Capabilities like cloud and mobile access, integration with existing systems, and a great user interface helped companies to deliver on their expense, travel, and invoice objectives. Automation also allowed IT teams to improve the efficiency of processes by empowering users with intuitive tools. Not only did this allow for greater productivity, but it had the added benefit of happier users, both of which reduced the burden on IT.

One IT leader that Forrester spoke to found that implementing automated tools allowed his company to eliminate around 42% of its human-engaged tasks, enabling the AI solution to process tasks within the ERP tool itself. The result was a 46% efficiency gain.

Reporting capabilities get everyone on the same page

Paper-based invoicing and manual expense reporting make for an uncertain reporting process. Even small errors in paperwork can make analytics unreliable or possibly unusable in some cases.

By automating more of the reporting responsibilities and consolidating that information within a central tool, that data becomes more accessible, more trustworthy, and more valuable. This allows auditors and analysts to get a clearer picture of fiscal health around the business, which also helps to raise the profile of the IT organization among company leadership.

For more on how your team can increase efficiency and meet the goals of leadership while also increasing user satisfaction, read the full Forrester report today.