Power Tools

Painless and lightning fast mobile reporting is reshaping the way expenses get done

- Erica Stevens

Smartphones are invaluable in business, and not just because they’ve turned airports and all 24,000 Starbucks locations into legitimate office space. Software innovations like optical character recognition (OCR) and parsing technology have transformed expense reporting, too – from an onerous chore awaiting business travelers at month’s end, to a portable, minutes long process that gives travel managers unparalleled access to real-time spend data.

Mobile expense solutions are so efficient, says Mike Boult, vice president of business travel resources at Travel Leaders Network, companies might end up reimbursing more of their employees’ expenses than before. If this is the only drawback – that receipts don’t have time to vanish into the ether the way they once did – the question is not whether to invest in such a system, but who can afford not to?

Because reducing administrative drudgery isn’t just about making travelers happy. “This is a business issue,” says Boult. “This is about productivity.”

Survival of the Fittest

The number of automated expense management solutions on the market has grown substantially in the two plus decades since expense behemoth Concur launched. Mobile functionality is prime among the benefits they have in common, but not all solutions do mobile equally well.

According to Bradley Matthews, head of middle market product and marketing at U.S. Bank, “It’s a question of how are they using mobile? Are they doing more of the same, or do they have a system that is automatically culling through all your receipts to capture the details that you need, and automatically pre-populating them in the expense report?”