The6-s t

epPlan
ToAut omateYour
Travel&Expense
Management
Summary
Automating your expense management is a relatively simple project that will save your
company many unproductive manhours because employees no longer have to deal
with tedious expense reports, yield an ROI of up to 500 percent and increase your
employees’ happiness. Choosing the right travel & expense (T&E) tool, however, is
crucial. A good fit between your T&E solution and your company’s needs will be strongly
correlated with the success of your expense management automation. This whitepaper
will guide you through the process of preparing, choosing and implementing an expense
management solution.

Key Findings/recommendations

Unlike other ERP projects, automating your expense

management will affect the entire company. Ensuring you have
adequate support from your IT, finance or accounting and HR
department, as well as your business travelers is important for a
successful automation project.

Preparation is key for successfully automating your expense

management. Make sure you have a travel policy in place and a
clear view of what is working and what is not, before you move on
to next steps.

Don’t have much time to evaluate different vendors? Then go for

a best-of-breed expense management solution with advanced
functionalities, such as Rydoo, as this will ensure you have all the
features you need, simplify your T&E management tremendously
and save you money down the line.

A roadmap for automating your travel expense management 1

 Automating your expense management is a relatively
simple project that will save your company many
unproductive manhours because employees no longer
have to deal with tedious expense reports, yield an ROI
of up to 500 percent and increase your employees’
happiness. Choosing the right travel & expense (T&E)
tool, however, is crucial as a good fit between your T&E
solution and your company’s needs will be strongly
correlated with the success of your expense management
automation. Reading this guide is, therefore, the first
and most important step in improving the way your
company deals with expenses. This whitepaper will
guide you through the process of preparing, choosing
and implementing an expense management solution.

With more than 1.3 trillion USD spent last year on corporate
travel worldwide (GBTA, 2018), travel expense management
is becoming increasingly important for most companies.
Corporations are actively trying to gain control of their
travel and expense budgets, and expense management
tools are on the rise. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as
submitting, controlling and analyzing expense report data
is a time-consuming and tedious task for employees as
well as finance departments, that can easily be completely
automated by T&E solutions.
According to Gartner (2017), 54% of companies have already
(partially) automated their expense control processes,

A roadmap for automating your travel expense management 2

 63%
of companies have already (par-
tially) automated their expense
control proccesses.
A roadmap for automating your travel expense management
while PayStream Advisors (2017) estimates this number to
be already 63%. This number will only keep growing, as
optimizing your travel expense management (TEM) could
have a significant impact on your organization’s bottom
line. Fully automating your expense management will:
save your employees a great amount of time
filling out and processing expense reports
increase compliance with travel policy
reduce expense fraud and errors in expense
reports
simplify reporting and increase visibility into
spending patterns
all resulting in a huge decrease in costs and a great return
on investment (ROI).
To automate your expense management in a successful
manner, however, it is important to make sure you choose
the right TEM tool and implement it correctly. High adoption
rates amongst your employees are crucial to reduce the
time traveling employees, approvers and accounting/
finance departments spend on expenses and to maximize
your return on investment. This whitepaper will guide you
and your company successfully through choosing and
implementing the perfect tool to automate your expense
management. We identified five key steps:
Get a clear view of the status quo and
1
how you want to improve it
2 Get key people on board
Explore the possible solutioms and find a
3
good match
Implement your travel expense manage-
4
ment tool of choice
Evaluate your travel expense manage-
5
ment tool and travel policy
We will go through each step in detail in the remainder of
this whitepaper.
3
Step 1: Get a clear view of the status quo and how
you want to improve it
Preparation is key for
successfully selecting and
“ Give me six hours to chop down
implementing a good expense
management solution
“I was seduced by the concept
of Rydoo. The idea to have
users do their expense in real-
time, wherever they are, is a
real advantage. People can
now do their expense in the
bus or if they are waiting for a
client.”
Romain Benoist, CFO of
Pernod Ricard Western Europe
A roadmap for automating your travel expense management
a tree and I will spend the first four
”
sharpening the axe.
Abraham Lincoln
Preparation is key for selecting and implementing an
expense management solution successfully. Gathering
as much information as possible from key people in your
organization will not only allow you to select a T&E solution
that is a perfect fit with your company’s needs, it will also
ensure a smooth implementation of the tool. We listed five
key steps that will ensure you get all the information you
need for a successful project, from start to finish.
• Get a clear view of your current travel and business
expense policy. Not only will your expense policy help you
decide which expense management solution will be a good
fit with your company, your TEM vendor will also need this
information to customize their expense management tool
to your company’s needs. Don’t have a clear travel policy?
Then this is the perfect time to create an unambiguous
and workable policy for all your employees. Make sure,
however, that your expense policy is up and running
before you move on to later steps of this guide, as creating
a workable policy for travel and business expenses while
selecting or implementing a TEM solution will delay the
project and affect its success negatively.
• Define the problem(s) you want to solve. Defining these
clearly will not only help you during the selection and
implementation phase of this project, it will also help you
evaluate the effectiveness and return on investment (ROI)
of the implemented TEM solution afterward. Measuring is
knowing. Possible problem(s) that TEM solutions can solve
are:
4
 • Travel policies that are unclear or confusing for
employees.
• Time-consuming process for traveling employees
and finance and accounting departments.
• Late reimbursement of expenses paid by
employees.
• Incorrect employee expense reports.
• Expense fraud by employees.
• Unstructured and non-transparent data.
• Difficulties in processing expenses in accounting
software.
• Difficulties with compliance with local rules for
multinational companies.

• Talk to relevant people in your organization. Your IT,

finance/accounting and HR department are key players
in this project and will have to be involved heavily. Make
sure you understand their work processes when it comes
to expense management, what they want to see improved
and how.
• Finance/accounting are typically the main responsible
departments for managing T&E. The exact division of
roles differs between companies, but these departments
typically approve and control expense reports, include
the expenses in the accounting books, budget for future
travel and analyze expense data.
• HR is typically responsible for reimbursing expenses
employees paid out of pocket and employee happiness.
Both will improve greatly when using a good TEM
tool: reimbursing expenses can be automated, while
employees will no longer be frustrated when collecting
receipts and filling out tedious expense reports.
• IT is typically responsible for maintaining the software
the HR and finance/accounting departments use,
ensuring data can easily flow between different
programs and resolving issues and troubleshooting
problems.

Some key questions to ask these departments are: What

are your departments’ information and reporting needs?
How is T&E data being analyzed? What kind of data and

A roadmap for automating your travel expense management 5

 reports are lacking? Which workflows would your finance/
accounting department like to see improved? Which
information does HR need to reimburse your employees
Curious how digital security com-
(faster)?
pany Irdeto implemented Rydoo?
Read the case study here.
Of course, don’t overlook the people that will be using
your TEM solution the most: your traveling employees!
Make sure you also understand what is important to
them. Digital security company Irdeto did a great job of
involving its employees in the process. Their project team
conducted a survey on several employees to learn about
their process when it comes to filing expenses, frustrations
with the previous system and must-have features for the
new platform. This step helped them fine-tune their list of
requirements as well as increase the adoption rate of the
new tool as they implemented a platform that answered
the needs of the users.

• Understand your technology needs. How many employees

submit expenses each month? What technologies such as
your ERP suite, HRM modules or accounting software should
integrate with your TEM solution? And how can this be done?
Is storing travel and expense data in the cloud an issue? Are
there extra security issues or particularities of systems you
are using you should be aware of?

Figure: a line-up of possible integrations for expense

management solution Rydoo
Accounting and Finance

Productivity

“We trialed the platform and we

felt that Rydoo had the features
VAT Reclaim
we were looking for. From
digitizing receipts to the fully
integrated process of approvals
and finance controlling, it was
able to cover all our needs.” • Understand your features needs. Different TEM tools offer
Koen Dierckx, CFO of Van different features. While some online expense management
Breda Risk tools may be free, they also offer very basic functionality

A roadmap for automating your travel expense management 6

“Here at Deloitte we work with
SAP. We set up a bi-direction-
al interface through which we
upload all our data in our ERP.
When we then still want to
make some changes or correc-
tions in the expense reports,
they will also automatically be
adjusted in Rydoo. The imple-
mentation went smoothly be-
cause Rydoo is complementary
to SAP.”
Cindy Peeters, Finance Director
of Deloitte Belgium
Read here the 13 key features
to consider when choosing a
travel expense management
solution
Estimation of potential
cost-savings per month
A roadmap for automating your travel expense management
only. Best-of-breed solutions, such as Rydoo, on the other
hand, offer features such as advanced OCR technology to
“read” receipts and automatically pre-populate expense
lines, mileage and per diem calculations, compliance with
local regulations, the option to go completely paperless, a
mobile and desktop app and offline mode.
Make a list of all features that are important for your business
and your employees, and use this list when evaluating the
different TEM solutions.
• Determine the budget. How much are you willing to
spend on an expense management solution? Determining
this from the get-go will help you when selecting a TEM
tool, as well as ensuring that you can establish a high
return-on-investment (ROI) for this project. Making a ball-
park estimation of potential cost-savings will guide you in
setting a maximum budget for your expense management
tool. The biggest cost-savings for most companies come
from man-hours saved by traveling employees and by the
finance/accounting department who have to approve and
control expenses. An easy way to estimate this is by using
the following formula:
Average time Average hourly Total number of
spent on one X salary X expense reports
expense report per month
Average number Number of finance Average hourly
+ of hours spent X employees X salary
controlling T&E controlling T&E
per month per
finance employee
Do you want to estimate your potential cost-savings more
exactly? Then don’t forget to add extra costs associated
with errors in expense reports, expense fraud, duplicate
entries, currency conversions, non-compliance with
company travel and expense policy, etc. Our whitepaper
“The Return on Investment of Automating Your Travel &
Expense Management” looks at this in more detail.
7
Discover here how entrepre-
neur network Endeavor ob-
tained a return on investment of
1,605%
when implementing Rydoo
Step 2: Get key people on board
$26,63
the total average cost of submit-
ting 1 expense report manually
A roadmap for automating your travel expense management
Don’t know these numbers for your company? PayStream
Advisors (2017) has estimated that the total average cost
of submitting an expense report manually is $26.63, while
a fully automated TEM tool such as Rydoo cuts this cost
down to a mere $6.85.
How much your potential cost-savings and ROI will be
exactly, will depend on spending patterns in your company,
workflow processes, the number of traveling employees,
company revenue, employee adoption rate of the TEM tool
and the degree of automation your TEM tool of choice will
offer. On average, the most popular TEM solutions have a
pay-back period of 6 to 17 months (G2Crowd, 2018) and
with Rydoo, returns on investment of up to 500 percent
are not uncommon.
Do you expect travel expenses or the number of traveling
employees in your company to grow strongly in the
coming years? Then don’t forget to take these forecasts
into consideration when comparing different pricing plans.
As your accounting and finance department will be
impacted greatly by an expense management solution,
make sure they are aware of and prepared for the change.
Ensure you have adequate resources and commitment
from these departments to assist in the implementation of
the system. Automating your expense management is not
a traditional project during which the vendor does most of
the implementation. The TEM vendor might assist you with
the system integration work, but it will need your active
participation to customize the solution to your company’s
travel policy and reporting needs.
Moreover, automating your expense management can only
be successful if key people in your accounting and finance
department are convinced of and happy with the chosen
solution. It is therefore imperative to not only understand
their needs but actively involve them in the project from
start to finish.
8
Step 3: explore the possible solutions and find a
good match
With more than 100 software vendors offering a TEM
solution (Gartner, 2015), choosing an expense management
tool can seem like a daunting task. However, with so much
choice, it also means you can find the perfect tool for your
company’s needs for a good price!

Spending some time and effort in choosing the right

TEM application for your business will save you lots of
headaches, frustrations, time and money down the line. The
right travel expense management tool will make the entire
process hassle-free, will be easy to use for your traveling
employees, will produce relevant reports for your finance
department to track and monitor expenses, will integrate
perfectly with the software you already use and will have a
great return on investment (ROI) by reducing the time your
employees need to spend on unnecessary tasks.
Choosing the right tool will consist of multiple steps. Make
sure to involve your task force in the decision. A good
selection procedure will follow the following steps:

Write down a list with selection criteria that

1 are important for your company, based on
the information you collected in step 1.

Check how possible expense management

solutions score on your selection criteria.
2
Ask TEM vendors for extra information if
necessary.

Make a shortlist with candidates that are a

3
good fit with your company’s needs.

Ensure that these expense management

4 solutions are scalable and will suit your
business both now and in 5 years’ time.

Compare features, prices and user reviews

5
of the different candidates on your shortlist.

A roadmap for automating your travel expense management 9


Step 4: Implement your choice
“We looked at several platforms
and tried a few. With Rydoo we
were able to test drive all the
features. I put together a small
project team for the trial period
and everyone loved it. We then
decided to build a case with the
Rydoo team and presented it to
management.”
Matthew Streicher, Director
of Project Development of
Tippman Group
A roadmap for automating your travel expense management
Forward all this information to your task
6
force and ask their opinion.
Narrow down your shortlist to two or three
7 candidates, and make sure you understand
their product well.
Talk to these vendors, request a demo or
8 free trial and get your task force to do a
test-drive.
9 Make the final decision.
Congratulations! The hardest part is over, you have signed
a contract with an expense management tool provider. Now
comes the most exciting part: implementing and using your
brand-new tool.
To make sure the implementation goes smoothly, it is
best to prepare it thoroughly. Depending on the size of
your company, implementation can take hours or months.
Make sure every person involved in the project has a
clear vision of what should be done when – this applies to
people in your organization as well as your supplier. Make
sure you know what information your vendor will need to
customize their expense management tool to your needs
and provide it on time. While smaller companies tend to
roll out their expense management automation project at
once, large enterprises often work with different waves
of implementation or first run a pilot project, after which
they implement their TEM solution throughout the entire
company. Not only will this pilot phase help iron out any
kinks in your implementation or training you’ve set up for
your teams, but it will also provide you with an enthusiastic
pool of ambassadors that will help your organization make
the change more easily.
Make sure to support your pilot team and provide them
10
“Educating employees on the
rules of a different country
can be challenging, especially
when dealing with complex
regulations such as German per
diems. Rydoo’s built in per diem
module is really incredible. Now
we simply tell employees to use
the app to create their trip and
everything will be calculated for
them.”
Marisa Werle, Operations
Manager of Parakar
A roadmap for automating your travel expense management
with all resources they could need to start using the tool,
such as how-to guides, training sessions or explanation
videos and a way to get in touch with your TEM vendor
in case of questions or problems. Gather their feedback,
make adjustments and use this opportunity to ensure your
full launch goes as smoothly as possible.
Regardless of how you decide to implement your expense
management tool, it is key to get your employees on
board. As high adoption rates are crucial to the success
of the entire project, it is important to get your employees
excited about the new tool. Whether you communicate via
email or during a lunch & learn session, make sure you
show the change is backed by senior executives and share
the reasons for the change and the benefits this will bring
to the employees and the company. This will help them
be more open to the change. Moreover, implementing a
TEM tool could be the perfect opportunity to show your
employees how the company is embracing digital and how
it’s a modern organization that cares about the welfare of
its employees and wants to make their life easier.
While in some companies an email might be enough for
users to adopt a new tool, other companies might want
to host learning sessions to make sure everyone is on
board. When using Rydoo, the sessions to teach business
travelers how to use the app can be short and sweet, as
the app is very intuitive and easy to use. Make sure people
download the app and try it on the spot. This way you can
make sure that you answer all questions and that the first
experience with the app is successful - even for less tech-
savvy employees.
For your finance or accounting department, it might be
useful to host a couple of training sessions to show them
around in the new platform, how to extract data and how
to analyze insights. This way, you can ensure there is a
smooth transition, and your finance or accounting team
will take advantage of having real-time expense data and
insights.
11
Step 5: evaluate your TEM tool and travel policy
“For me personally I think it
was a very good process.
People would come to me to
say: “Mark, this is the best thing
ever.””
Mark Mathews, IT Manager of
Lavazza UK
“The CFO needs to oversee the
whole company - he’s always
thinking of the whole process.
With Rydoo, everything is well
organised. The reports are
really good. If I need to find a
receipt for a specific expense,
it’s easy to find - unlike the old
days where I’d spend ages
filtering through a whole library
of files.”
Cassiano Souza, CFO of
Endeavor Brazil
“Everything is visible. It’s
transparent. We have access to
all the data for all the company,
for the department, for the
manager and the user. We have
full control.”
Christine Darquenne, CFO of
Lineas
A roadmap for automating your travel expense management
While not necessary, this last step will ensure you get the
most out of your TEM tool and you maximize your return
on investment. An ideal timeframe for this last step is three
to six months after the implementation of your solution is
completed. This way, most employees have gotten used to
the new tool, whether they are business travelers, finance
or accounting employees.
Firstly, evaluate the expense management solution you
have chosen. Did the tool solve all problems outlined in
step 1 in a satisfactory fashion? What is the adoption rate of
the tool and are your employees happy using it? How is the
integration with the accounting or reimbursement software
in practice? Did reimbursement periods or compliance
rates with company travel policy improve?
Secondly, sit down with your finance or accounting team and
review how they use the data your expense management
solution produces. Do they use the data? What are some
insights the tool has produced and how have they acted
upon these insights?
Finally, reevaluate your travel policy. If the implementation
of your expense management solution has been successful,
you now have a great deal of extra insight about how
your employees travel and how they spend money while
traveling. These insights can help you finetune your travel
policy. What are the types of expenses that get rejected?
What are the reasons for rejection? Are there certain hotel
chains or airlines your employees use often? And could
you negotiate a better corporate rate with said chains or
airlines now that you have a better overview of the amount
of business they generate through your company?
12
Conclusion

Automating your expense management is a simple project

that can nonetheless have high rewards. A TEM solution will
save your company many unproductive manhours because
employees no longer have to fill in tedious expense
reports, reduce expense errors and even expense fraud,
and increase employee happiness and retention rates.
All these factors together make automating your expense
management a project that can easily yield an ROI of up to
500 percent or more.

Choosing the right T&E tool, however, is crucial as a good fit

between your T&E solution and your company’s needs will
be strongly correlated with the success of your expense
management automation. Preparing the automation of
your expense management well is therefore important.

Make sure you have a travel policy in place

and a clear view of what is working and what
is not, before you move on to the next steps.

Unlike other ERP projects, automating your

expense management will affect the entire
company. Ensuring you have adequate support

A roadmap for automating your travel expense management 13

 from your IT, finance or accounting and HR
department, as well as your business travelers
is important for a successful automation
project.

Don’t have much time to evaluate different

vendors? Then go for a best-of-breed expense
management solution with advanced
functionalities, such as Rydoo, as this will
ensure you have all the features you need and
save you money down the line.

Further readings References

G2Crowd 2 (2018). https://www.g2crowd.com/reports/grid-report-for-expense-manage-
ment-spring-2018?gated_consumer=94a30ec2-c306-42d5-bdb3-02ef743c2f1c&tab=da-
ta-adoption
Gartner (2015). Technology Overview for Travel Expense Management Applications, 12p.
Gartner (2017). Market Guide for Travel Expense Management Software. 27 p.
GBTA (2018). GBTA BTI™ Outlook. Annual Global Report & Forecast.
Rydoo Hub PayStream Advisors (2017). 2017 Travel and Expense Management Report. Exploring
the Value and Use Case of Leading Travel and Expense Management (TEM) Automation
Software. 40 p.

A roadmap for automating your travel expense management 14

Rydoo offers you worldwide compliance and financial control.
We reduce your corporate travel costs and the time you spend
on administrative tasks by at least 75%.

Rydoo reinvents and simplifies travel and expense management to a

few clicks and photos, whilst saving time and optimising costs.

As a result, all employees will benefit from a stellar user experience and
enjoy an excellent booking tool (93% adoption within the first month)
offering the best hotels and flight fares all in one place and, when
needed, they can take a photo of receipts to be reimbursed. With the
very same tool, finance directors gain visibility on actionable data and
hidden costs via integration of company policies. Rydoo covers the full
scope of any trip or expense and can be tailored to companies’ needs:
travel only, expense management only or both.

Find out how Rydoo can help your company save time and resources
managing expenses.

GO TO RYDOO.COM
With 500K+ users in 60 countries, Rydoo makes your life easy