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 (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.

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

Sarbanes and Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX or “Sarbox”) has mandated stringent auditing requirements for public companies across America. The Act aims to prevent lax documentation and auditing fiascoes that can (and did) bring down important public corporations, with untold damage to the economy and the shareholder public.

Record keeping and seamless documentation of expenses are at the heart of good SOX compliance. The results are audited by both internal and external auditors. If any “significant” documentation shortcomings cannot be fixed within a matter of months, the corporation might be forced to report it in its annual report, which would of course damage shareholder trust and peril the company’s future.

Since travel and expense is a major source of recurring expenditure for most corporations, it is crucial that a T&E system is in place to insure correct record keeping, policy auditing, expense approving and report generation at all levels within the organization.

Here is a checklist to help you decide whether your T&E software is good enough to satisfy the SOX compliance criteria and help you minimize your legal and tax liabilities:

1) Does your T&E software allow for policy configuration and policy auditing of individual expense reports? This is a key requirement that you should definitely insist on when purchasing your T&E software. Expenses made, reported and approved contrary to or regardless of corporate-, department-, or project-level policies become liabilities during a SOX audit.

The existence of documented (electronically or written) policies is the very first thing a SOX auditor will focus on. But that’s not enough. The same policies should also be enforced electronically through your T&E system; otherwise you have no audibility.

2) Does your T&E software provide security measures so that only the authorized personnel can access the administrator role and configure the corporate T&E policies? If the parameters and limits of such policies can be changed at will by unauthorized personnel, it will certainly put you at risk of having a “significant deficiency.”

3) Can your T&E software itemize the hotel and transportation bills properly? Does it allow the bills to be submitted instantly without delay, no matter where the employee might be in the world? Does it track and account for taxes paid in different tax areas like city, state or province? Does it take into consideration the local currency?

4) Does your T&E software provide Work Breakdown Structure hierarchical reporting capability? This provides the necessary accounting to ensure your costs are managed and billed correctly.

5) Does your T&E software provide a reliable Approval Workflow that can be configured easily by the Administrator? Such workflow capability provides the necessary controls to ensure that travel is approved before your employee or contractors book their travel.

6) Does your T&E software provide a way to capture an image of the expense receipts electronically? Can these images be attached electronically to the expense report itself? Such documentation is indispensable for a corporation. If and when there is an allegation of malpractice or fraud, electronic image records with secure time stamps can be used as evidence in a court of law.

7) How long and how safe the T&E records are kept? Record retention is another important aspect of SOX compliance. Typically, records must be kept for seven years. Is your T&E data backed up regularly? Is it kept safe in a mission-critical data facility? If your T&E data is lost for one reason or another it will not look good in the eyes of the SOX auditors.

Can your T&E software easily generate separate expense reports made available to your CFO and other related departments within the organization? Can the data be exported as Excel sheets, the favorite data format for your finance department? Company officials with easy access to reports will prepare their staff for the SOX audits with the kind of high self-confidence that will show during the review.

9) Does your T&E software have documented process controls in place to ensure highest-level data privacy and consistent report generation? That’s the kind of robust system control that impresses a SOX auditor.

There are a lot of T&E software packages out there but they differ in the way they comply with SOX rules; and more importantly, the way they secure your data.

One new Software as a Service T&E online solution that satisfies almost all of the above conditions is www.web2expense.com. It’s worth to have a look and see if it would meet your SOX-related reporting and documentation needs.

(Copyright-free photo courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Another important aspect of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model is the way it facilitates and supports the new “Unified Communications” model of inter-corporate collaboration.

The days when the companies used to hide behind the firewalls and did their business mostly through the intranet are coming to a close.

Now the emphasis is on consolidating all modes of communication (from e-mail to webinars) into one easily accessible channel. And given the fact that bandwidth is ceasing to be a determining issue with every passing day, SaaS model emerges as the natural choice of all forward-thinking companies.

Cisco, which has purchased the SaaS pioneer WebEx for $3.2 billion, has joined those investing heavily in new SaaS platforms.

Multi-media software giant Adobe systems also joined Cisco in welcoming the new SaaS era. We’ll see more Adobe products in the days ahead that encourage collaboration over the Internet, thanks to products developed true to the SaaS paradigm.

The Revolution has just begun.

System security is a must. (See this post)

No matter how good an SaaS solution is, if it’s hackable then obviously it’s no good.

But how about the physical security of your data?

Where does the Saas company keep your data?

Have you ever thought about that?

Do they keep your data in a server in the back office, right next to the rest room?

If a storm blows away the office of your company, will you lose all your data and your business?

Those are important questions to ask before signing up with a SaaS solution because you will be entrusting them your valuable and confidential business data.

Our answer to those questions as web2expense.com is simple:

Your data is stored and protected in a military-grade mission-critical super-secure data facility only a mile away from AOL’s World Headquarters in hi-tech Northern Virginia where half of world’s Internet traffic passes from.

This is a hardened nondescript facility that occupies a whole block and it takes many security checkpoints protected not only by human guards but also CCTV cameras, bio-hand-readers and keypads.

All our data servers are kept in locked steel cages, right next to other cages where for example Google’s local servers also keep humming 24 hours a day.

To really appreciate the depth and extent of our physical data security we encourage you to visit this page and read a detailed account of a recent visit our editor has paid to our data center for our clients and readers:

http://www.web2expense.com/w2excms.nsf/$All/3F9BCF96A890958C8525738B0077699C?OpenDocument

We protect your data 24×7 as if it were our own data because your business is our business.

Data security has been considered to be the soft underbelly of the Software as a Service model.

However, the reality, at least the way we implement the SaaS model here at web2expense.com, has been a lot different.

Why?

Because we as Beyond Portals have made security and data privacy our top concern since day number one.

That’s why we have built our enterprise system on the super secure IBM Domino platform.

When our Marketing Director says to steal data from Web2Expense is harder than “to steal gold from Fort Knox,” he is not exactly exaggerating.

First off, we use a lot fewer number of communication ports than a majority of enterprise systems out there. That’s where real security begins.

The more doors and windows you have into a system, the more vulnerabilities you create. That has been the chief architectural weakness of many enterprise systems out there.

Secondly, all our system processes and communications are encoded and tagged with unique hard-to-break URLs and internal identifiers. Those pointers are extremely hard to duplicate randomly. That is another level of security built right into the system.

Thirdly, a visitor needs to enter not only her User ID and Password but her Company ID as well to access any of her data. There are other system security features of Web2Expense that we’ll analyze in our posts.

To sum – yes, security IS an important issue for all online browser-based solutions. We recognize that today and we recognized it back in 2005 when we started to develop our travel and expense solution. That’s why we can offer it proudly today as the solution that will serve all road warriors exceptionally well.

(See this post on physical data security)

Travel expenses generally represent the second or third largest controllable expense category in most companies. The reason may be due to fact that you have to spend money in order make money. The question is how do you control spending? Most companies have written policies about their own company’s expenses.

These expense policy booklets and/or one page documents are handed over to you on your first day when you start a new job. Employees and managers are required read and remember these rules and regulations when travelling. This one pager may certainly be enough for companies that have static business rules. With static business rules we mean one size fits all.

However, when we look at companies, institutions, and governments around the world we see a changing variety of rules and regulations. Let’s take for example General Services Adminstration (GSA). GSA publishes an expense policy which outlines different lodging, meals, and incidental rates for a large number of cities in the United States.

To accomodate complex policy based expense reports Web2Expense offers an intuitive interface to design and implement multiple expense policies for company travel requirements. These policies can be enforced at company, department, project or user levels providing maximum flexibility to achieve tight control around travel expenditures.

Beyond Portals is a software as a service company(SaaS) . We design, develop, implement, and deploy on-demand software solutions for companies, organizations, and governments worldwide. Our software geared to small to midsize companies. We have released our first SaaS product Web2Expense last month.

Web2Expense Travel Expense Management is the first product that is only offered on SaaS. There is no desktop version of the product, like many other SaaS offerings it can only be used as an online application.

In our blog we will address to many questions, such as how to utilize Web2Expense or how to configure or tweak it. Feel free to post any questions you may have, we welcome your comments!