Does Your T&E Expense System Support Multiple User Roles?

An ideal Travel and Entertainment expense and management system should be able to assign different types of accesses to individuals with different roles.

In traditional software design the distinction between a regular “user” and an “administrator” is well established and respected. However, that’s not enough for an T&E expense management software due to the variety of roles that keep an enterprise running smoothly.

For example, an individual in the Employee role should be able to create and maintain travel approval requests (TAR) and expense reports (ER).

However, only a Manager should be able to approve or reject travel requests and expense reports. And once a “line manager” approves a request or report, there’s a need for an Accounts Payable (AP) Manager to process the approved ERs. Your T&E expense management software should be able to assign an AP Manager role as well.

There should also be an Executive role with the authorization to override any policy limits and request approvals or rejections.

Finally, a good T&E expense management software should be able to accommodate those individuals with temporary access to the organization like the Visitors and Contractors.

Web2Expense is an online T&E expense solution that easily assigns these multiple roles to individual users for a fully scalable system. Visit
www.web2expense.com today for a free trial of its many enterprise-level benefits.

Electronic Records Management and T&E Expense Management Systems

Electronic Records Management (ERM) is an important part of every business enterprise in this day and age of strict compliance regulations.

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 ticket, etc.) with the data itself.

Web2Expense is an online T&E expense management platform with such a built-in Electronic Records Management system. Visit www.web2expense.com today for a free trial of its cutting-edge features and long list of benefits for enterprise-level applications.

T&E Expense Deduction: GSA’s Per-Diem Rates versus the Actuals

CBS.MarketWatch.com has published an excellent case study of the merits of using per-diem deductions for Travel and Entertainment expenses over using the “actuals.” The study focused on the case of “Stagger Lee” Marshall, a Turner Broadcasting announcer for the pro-wrestling circuit.

Marshall’s job took him criss-crossing the land and thus he built up quite an expense list with all that lodging, meals and other incidentals. He basically paid everything by cash and he sometimes kept the receipts and sometimes he didn’t. Yet he deducted them from his taxes thanks to the “Cohan Rule.”

What is “Cohan Rule”? Named after the Broadway celebrity George M. Cohan, the rule allows deduction of “ ordinary and necessary’ business expenses” without any receipts. The same rule allows deductions for those who lose their receipts in a fire, flood or some other catastrophic event as well.

Since Marshall was a relatively well known celebrity and he had the habit of sending postcards from whichever city he happened to be in, proving his itinerary even in the absence of receipts did not prove to be hard for him.

We do not know the total amount that Marshall was eligible to deduct on the basis of his “cash actuals.”

However, CBS MarketWatch did a rough calculation of how much Marshall could’ve written off had he used GSA’s high-low per diem table (as expressed in the IRS Publication 463).

The total for lodging and meals added up to almost $24,000. Not bad for a year’s worth of deductions, is it?

Next time you feel like using actuals, you might also ask your CPA to compare it with the per-diem totals and see which one would work better for you.

Source: CBS MarketWatch