Challenges

Potential clients are facing the following challenges when dealing with Expense Reports:

• Employees do not always respect the internal policies regarding expenses and expense notes. Management has difficulties to control compliance with internal policies due to lack of time or policy complexity.
• The approval process of expense notes is often manual and time consuming. Handling paper reports consumes valuable management time.
• It is difficult to ensure that expenses have been minimised in accordance with company policies.
• It is hard for management to challenge expenses via mail or telephone. It is challenging to track related communication.

HDS Solution

Our Expense Notes Management solution facilitates the administration of expense notes as well as business trip authorisations and administration. Our solution employs a customised web-based Expense Notes Management portal.

If you choose the standard option, you can adopt a best practices process based on our many years of experience worldwide. However, if the standard option differs with your company internal procedures, our consultants will ensure an easy system parameterisation to include your internal procedures and organisational specificities.

To facilitate the expense notes management process and make it easy and efficient, HDS integrates the various business and legal practices in the world, including: multiple global currencies, travel allowances, Value Added Tax (allowing both local and foreign VAT reclaim), income tax and benefits in kind (built to ensure full compliance with various income tax laws), regulated per diem rates; vehicle mileage; local statutory reporting; corporate credit card data.

One of main purposes of the system is to minimise the time of approval of the Expense Notes reports while ensuring full compliance with the internal authorisation rules. The system allows measuring the time for approval at each stage of the process, allowing management to identify the reasons for any delays.

Our solution allows various ways of submission of expense reports. Online submission is more convenient for staff with ready access to the Internet, and offline submission is more convenient for staff, who travel frequently.

Being compliant is not optional anymore with the HDS solution! Our customised solution respects your internal authorisation procedures and no expense report is disbursed before a compliance authorisation. The system also ensures both compliance with the expenditure limits set by your company and submission of supporting documents such as invoices, cash receipts by your employees.

Our solution ensures that the accounting entries are automatically prepared and ready for transfer to your ERP or accounting system. The transactions are as detailed as your accounting rules require, including cost centres, expenditure types, project/client codes, etc.

The HDS solution makes sure that no expense note is disbursed without a compliance authorisation. However, controllers and management often need to identify spending trends by expenditure types and to help them take additional action to optimise cost further.

Our Business Intelligence solution is powerful and yet easy to use. It produces on-demand reporting and delivers the expense analysis, which users need in their preferred format and exactly when they need it.

The powerful HDS reporting tool provides management with comprehensive expense data analysis, supplying visibility into staff expenditure. The extended drill-down capabilities allow identification of variances versus prior periods and budget. The tool allows observation of various trends. Users can quickly analyse their employee expense data to optimise vendor negotiations, spend management and reduce fraud.

Key Benefits

• Full compliance – all expenses are authorised as required within the expenditure limits set by your company.
• Cost saving – financial controllers are able to identify trends and variances in staff expenditure, which would allow them to take action to minimise unnecessary costs.
• Faster processes – via notifications and escalations, the system ensures the process develops within the expected timeframe.
• Convenience – submission extremely convenient for users and provides them with possibilities to ask questions and challenge expenses. Management approval is easy.
• Tracking – the system ensures full tracking of the authorisation process, thus keeping evidence for management or audit purposes.