Making expense management free of unwieldy processes, costly delays and pointless layers can create a two-pronged advantage for your sales efforts – they get faster and happier.

Automation and Analytics have spread over almost all stripes of enterprise processes today. So it is only natural to bring the advantages of real-time control and accounting to the area of travel and expense management.

However, this is not so easy. Plugging in an app in an area like this means more than some quick reports and some easy celebrations. Because when it comes to travel processes, as trivial as they may look in the books, they can go a long and deep way in determining both the organisation’s net profitability and the sales-team morale.

For this company, that has been a market leader of home-care industry with over 30 percent market share, the retail and B2B segments depend a lot on the persistence and innovation brought in by the sales teams. More so for big retail partners, institutional clients and large-scale companies which need a dedicated and consistent sales team for lead generation, follow-up, conversion and engagement.

Hence, it became vital to streamline the parts which enable these sales teams to do their jobs well – because these are the very parts that can become head-aches if they continue to stay stuck in procedural hops, paper mountains, frustrating booking cycles, burdensome billing tasks, long reimbursement delays.

That’s where this company thought of Staqo. The brief was simple – make the travel and expense parts of the enterprise – simple, light-weight, data-easy, swift and convenient for both employees and their managers. Was it possible?

The Module – And how it works

The company simply wanted a system where employees could input expenses in an easy and automated way. The platform should be so seamless and clever that it should equip the employee with fast bookings and hurdle-free expense entries and control. The Staqo team created a platform where employees could input expenses and travel requirements for approval from anywhere and anytime. This was deliberately made to be device-agnostic and format-free. This allowed employees to use anything – browsers, mobiles, other devices etc. They could just enter their needs and the same would be tracked, and facilitated, with instant approvals, automated bookings and billings right to the point of reimbursements. The module was designed with the idea of minimising any administrative effort to the last possible inch. It was also given a parallel data-control and visibility tool so that managers could track and manage the employee’s financial movements with real-time monitoring. This meant that all trips should be made easy for employees to book but at the same time adequate transparency and relevance should be injected with appropriate invoice-controls and approvals.

The module was integrated with travel management applications and had a time-tracking architecture complemented with payroll and accounting systems at the right interfaces. At the same time, the app was given other features like photo-capture, auto-scan, transcription and archival so that the employee found the whole process completely devoid of unnecessary effort. The apps were also strengthened with ability for credit card reconciliation, multi-level approvals, swipe-and-go permissions, fast expense reports, overspending thresholds, live-support for escalations etc.

The entire design was cloud-borne, user-friendly, minimalistic, flexible, and amenable for integrations with other applications like CRM, employee performance management, compensation management, tax planning or Accounting. It was created with the perspective of a sales person on the road (literally and metaphorically) with nothing but a Smartphone in hand. The app should make the travel and expense part of his job easy and simple. And that’s what it did.

Capabilities:

  • Expenses monitored and collated in a central (but real-time) repository for road travel on a per/kilometre basis
  • Expenses could be submitted, approved, tracked and categorised in a real-time manner
  • Hotel bookings are handled, and processed, with swift processing and storage for all expense reimbursement and control areas
  • Daily Call Reports or DCRs are created as and when an entry is made or a sales person moves on the lead cycle
  • Sales cycle is covered in a comprehensive and granular way while also aligning with the overall roadmap and sales plan
  • All travel expenses are stored in specific formats and sliced as per a given team’s/function’s management approach
  • Data from disparate sources and formats can be easily pulled in and streamlined
  • The entire travel process from requirement generation, ticket (flight, cab, train etc.) booking, hotel booking, road travel, food and beverage expenses to miscellaneous charges – everything is facilitated in a frictionless and employee-friendly way but without leaving any loose-ends for mismanagement, fabrication, shadow expenses, confusion or embezzlement

Outcomes:

The platform created two small app that worked in harmony to deliver the big goals of smart and transparent expense management, while also manifesting some other results:

  1. Human trouble and hassles, at every stage of expense management, were wiped off
  2. Expenses could be correlated and analysed in a way that the Cost vs. Profit trade-off of every sales and marketing exercise could be ascertained with full visibility and drill-downs
  3. Billing was automated. That means employees and sales teams did not have to wait or engage in follow-up to get their reimbursements. This created a high level of satisfaction and motivation among employees. It also liberated their time and attention for the core parts of their jobs instead of chipping away their precious time for bureaucratic exertions
  4. Errors are mitigated and efficiency gets a boost in a comprehensive way
  5. Managers could wield a tight control over the progress of their sales and marketing plans – both for pre-spend and post-spend scenarios
  6. Any blind spots in budgeting or sales planning could be picked instantly – and with rectification-enablement
  7. End-to-end management of corporate travel is possible thanks to comprehensive itinerary visibility, productive travel planning and real-time field control
  8. Comparisons between different travel vendors and hospitality partners could be made with a data-driven eye. The company could save costs and smoothen the overall chain by knowing where the strengths stand and where any weaknesses emerge
  9. Time-sensitive travel decisions could be made without wasting hours in long booking or billing processes. This empowered the sales teams to close even cold leads and accelerate their conversion efforts with a new advantage
  10. Excessive spending and out-of-pocket expense areas could be quickly identified and corrected
  11. The complete view is a single-source-of-truth which is scalable, compliance-ready, accurate, secure and seamless

The elegance of this platform is that it can be easily customised and dovetailed for the requirements of any other industry. The use of open and flexible components and a distinct design approach makes this platform attractive (and flexible) enough for any other expense and travel management need. As this company realised in a novel and consistent way, sales teams are productive and happy when the road is made smooth. So that travelling is not a process-heavy nightmare but an exciting part of one’s customer journey.