Go Green With Mobile Expense Management Software

Managing travel expenses of your employees is a tough task. So, no wonder those businesses all over the world are looking for efficient solutions that assist in cost reduction, and help the environment by bringing down the carbon footprints. If you too are searching for solutions that use modern technology to manage business travel expenses efficiently, and let you go green to serve the environmental cause, you should try looking for software and applications that can help you in your endeavor.

Mobile expense management software offer you a simplified solution for expense management even when you are on the go. Offering world class data security, such software help you to bid adieu to the cumbersome manual processes, and switch to a user-friendly process. When you use such software for managing travel expenses, you can get easy access to the required data and documents and even take a look at insights on the go. What’s more, you can even customize such software to meet the objectives of your green travel policy

like: increasing awareness among staff about travel choices and their implications reviewing travel and subsistence policies to encourage your staff to use more sustainable travel options when travelling on business

promoting and facilitating more active modes of travel maximizing the efficiency of your fleet /other vehicle and Ensuring that your green travel policy is embedded into existing departmental and corporate processes, which are reviewed regularly.

However, enforcing such a travel policy would require planning of every step in a very systematic manner. This is where expense management software can help. Since managers these days are kept busy while handling a number of tasks featured on their daily agenda, using such software and applications can make their job of cross checking each travel plan with company’s rules and regulations, and approving the same a hassle-free job.

Using their tablets or smartphones, managers can approve the travel requests of employees, check whether proposed travel plans comply with the company’s policy, verify the expense claims and receipt images in detail, approve the expense claim/reject it and return to the employee, and do much more, even when they are on the road.

Mobile Expense Management in Controlling your T&E Expenses

Businesses trying to exercise effective corporate expense management often have to deal with a core component that has become a major spending area T&E expenditure. As business travel is a key element of meeting corporate goals, such expenses have become ubiquitous. Unlike the past where businesses used manual and paper-based methods for dealing with such expenditure, which often resulted in delayed processing times and inflated organizational costs, you can now use web-based methods that can be accessed and used by mobile/smartphone users, thus effectively controlling such costs.

Some recent research studies have shown that organizations armed with smartphone/mobile access to their corporate expense management and travel booking system have effectively driven performance across various levels like expenditure reporting times , policy compliance, and expenditure processing costs. You too can use mobile expense management solutions, which are completely integrated with their bigger, in-office solutions, and can link users directly to travel policies. Such solutions also let users view itineraries and book ‘add-on' T&E items easily like restaurant bookings, car rentals etc, while directors and managers can review and give consent to expenses in queue.

For improving expenditure management performance and drive value across the organization, businesses managing complex categories of spending, especially T&E expenditure, need to get visibility into core areas of spending. With mobile/smartphone enabled web-based solutions, visibility into T&E expenditure becomes almost double as compared to solutions that are not mobile/smartphone enabled. Getting a clear view into this aspect of spending is also crucial to keep track of how your actual business expenditure matches with your budget proposals and forecasted data. By getting real time access to spend information, businesses can now use such solutions to forecast future business travel expenditure and plan their budgets accordingly.

By using mobile expense management, you can also ensure that audits of expenditure reports are conducted regularly, analyze actual T&E spend to identify savings opportunities, ensure policy compliance and do much more, all of which will bring top-tier performance benefits to your business. Whether your employees and management level staff are out of office or taking a vacation, such solutions let them complete their respective tasks within a few moments, without the need of keeping the paper versions of bills or hotel receipts, or waiting for the moment when they would be back in office to update these costs in the centralized system. With such convenience and ease-of-use, mobile applications can surely make life a lot easier.

Your Company and the Sunshine Act

When the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010, the face of health care in the United States went through a massive change in a number of ways, for both consumers and business owners. If you own a company, you likely know about this all too well. And one of the biggest adjustments has to do with disclosure rules.

It's called the Physicians Payments Sunshine Act. As of August of last year, all companies that deal with physicians and hospitals - such as manufacturers of medical devices, pharmaceutical firms and makers of biological products - are now required to report any payments made to doctors at health care centers and/or teaching hospitals to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which operates under the umbrella of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Anything more than $10 has to be reported. This includes expenses related to food, education, travel, consulting fees or charity contributions. Those that don't may be hit with a costly fine, totaling anywhere from $10,000 to as much as $1 million.

This coming September, data on payments and gifts made to physicians and teaching hospitals must be available for the public to access through a federal database. However, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, many professionals in the health care industry are not aware of some of these various requirements. That's where Certify can help.

How you can comply with Certify. Certify has the tools you need to ensure that you're in compliance with the Sunshine Act. Certify has a suite of resources geared specifically for this health care law mandate. With our innovative expense solution system, your employees can submit expenses that went to physicians through a few button clicks.

Just as one example, you and your employees can categorize physician expenses with Certify Mobile . For example, if costs were related to meals, there's a category just for that on the app. All you have to do is enter in the expense details. The search tool allows you to select the physician or physicians that the meals went to.