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How Does T&E Fit in With Procure-to-Pay Software?
When discussing how to manage spend in the procure-to-pay process, we often think of spend management as involving budgeting, procurement, accounts payable, and payment. But there’s another key department involved in spend management: travel and expense (T&E).
Much like procurement, T&E involves employees making business purchases that the company is going to pay for. If you want to automate, digitize, and take control over company spend, then you need to consider T&E as well as the other financial departments.
Automation’s Role in Spend Management
Automating business processes cuts processing costs and streamlines spend management, all while providing increased control over finances. It also makes the whole process more user-friendly, increasing employee satisfaction and productivity. These benefits come with automating individual processes, but they’re even more pronounced when you can automate multiple processes using a software suite.
To gain insight into and control over spend, it helps to centralize and digitize financial processes. With the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model of business process automation (BPA), it’s very easy to keep all the financial processing information in one place that’s easy to access. The software digitally stores all financial data and updates in real-time. This simplifies oversight of financial transactions. It also makes it easy to generate reports and access data related to spend management, allowing for more strategically informed purchasing, budgeting, and planning.
The Importance of T&E Automation
T&E is one of the departments that benefit greatly from software automation. When this process isn’t automated or digitized, employees can often become frustrated with the system. The need to turn in paper receipts, fill out paper or digital forms, and wait for a lengthy approval process can mean high processing costs for the company and long wait times for employees before they receive reimbursement.
With T&E software automating much of the process and digitizing everything, travel and expense reporting goes much more smoothly. It’s easier for employees who are submitting expense reports since all they have to do is log in to the software, upload a picture of their receipts, and submit the expense report. They’ll also have an easy time looking up expense reimbursement policies, to make sure the expense they’re submitting qualifies for reimbursement. The software also makes things easier for employees who are processing the expense report by gathering all the essential information digitally and streamlining the approvals process.
Overlaps and Differences Between T&E and Procurement
Procurement automation is a separate software system from T&E automation, but it has some similar functions. In both cases, the software makes it easy for employees to comply with the purchasing or expense reimbursement policy. You can customize the software to enforce your company’s own policies and rules.
With procurement software, however, the employees make purchases within the software system. Those purchases go through the procurement system, creating an automatically generated purchase order. When the invoice arrives for the purchase, it goes directly to accounts payable.
With T&E software, employees make purchases themselves and then submit reimbursement requests to the company. NextProcess software makes these requests simple to submit and speeds up processing significantly. It’s also a flexible software solution, customizable to your company’s unique needs and policies. You can even set up some categories of expenses for automated approval to further streamline the process.
An End-to-End Solution Simplifies Financial Processing
Business process automation is a game changer for companies, and implementing it as part of an end-to-end solution takes BPA to the next level. One of the things that sets NextProcess apart from other software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions is that we offer a true end-to-end software package. Automating the entire procure-to-pay process, and related financial departments, all together simplifies finances and spend management.
It’s okay to mix and match with some things, but with software, that’s a recipe for disaster. You don’t want to deal with the potential software conflicts that can come with using one software provider for Accounts Payable, another for T&E, a different one for purchase orders, etc. It’s also much easier to look at and manage all of the company spend when you have all the financial departments automated using similar software.
T&E as Part of an End-to-End Solution
Travel and expense reporting, processing, and payment all play a key role in an end-to-end financial software solution. It just doesn’t make sense to automate other parts of the procure-to-pay process and keep T&E on spreadsheets or paper.
Automating and digitizing T&E gives your company greater insight into and control over company spend. When you automate T&E and procurement with software modules from the same provider, you’ll have the tools you need to track both ways employees spend money for your company. The software also simplifies compliance, making it much easier for employees to understand and follow expense reimbursement and purchasing policies. It’s a win-win situation for employees and the company, balancing user-friendliness with ease of policy compliance and spend management.
The NextProcess Solution
NextProcess offers the only suite of software with modules to power and simplify your capital project management, procurement & purchase orders, accounts payable, travel & expense, and payment disbursements. When you automate with us, you can be confident that you’re choosing a software provider that can offer a true end-to-end solution.
All these software modules work great on their own, and you can use as many as you want in your company. They all integrate seamlessly with existing ERPs to provide your company with the robust automation solutions that you need. When you automate with NextProcess for your end-to-end software solution, you don’t need to worry about software conflicts. Going with one software suite for all your automation also simplifies implementation and makes it easier for different departments to work together.