Tips for cloud-based travel and expense management projects.
Travel and expenses are the second most difficult operating expense for businesses to control. To avoid losing control of expenses, businesses should not approach implementing a cloud-based travel and expense management system as a stand-alone activity.
Matt Goss, managing director, ANZ Concur, said, “To have an effective T&E management system, businesses must ensure it is integrated across departments, within business operations and across technologies. Organisations need to move away from paper receipts and spreadsheets. They need visibility into spend to ensure travel and expenses are compliant.”
Concur offers ten integration tips for organisations wanting to integrate their expenses in the cloud:
1. Create cloud connections. Have a clear strategy to manage the move into the cloud. Make your data secure. Ask these questions:
- What corporate data is being stored by the cloud provider?
- How is the cloud provider storing data?
- It’s worth comparing the security of your own on-premise systems and infrastructure with that of the cloud provider
2. Make your data secure. Understand what corporate data, including the personal data of your organisation’s employees, is being stored by the cloud provider
3. Are your cloud connections secure? It’s important to understand the level of security of each method for data transmission between the systems of your company and those of the cloud provider
4. Take advantage of enterprise mobility. Mobility is becoming an essential prerequisite for T&E Management systems
5. Don’t forget about your legacy data. Ensure that you have planned how you are going to securely store your T&E legacy data when you switch over to a new system
6. Appoint an executive sponsor. It’s essential to appoint an executive sponsor at the beginning when the scope of the project, selection criteria and goals and outcomes are being established
7. A cloud service is an implementation project. Cloud solutions don’t set themselves up, and project management is a critical factor in the success of the implementation
8. Take advantage of integration shortcuts. You can shorten the development cycle by taking advantage of “packaged integrations” and connectors that create connections between applications and systems
9. Use carrots, not sticks. Look for opportunities to incentivise the use of the new travel and expense management systems and build rewards directly into the apps
10. What are other regions and business departments doing? Seize opportunities to leverage a common platform across business departments and regions.
