The beginning of a new year is a great time to reflect back on the accomplishments of the previous year. At Oversight, we had a lot of exciting things happen in 2015, including the launch of some new Insights in the T&E module.
In mid-2015, Oversight introduced a new Excessive Personal Spend Insight that identifies employees who are excessively using the company’s corporate travel card for personal purchases.
Why do companies care when their employees use their corporate card for personal use? The company is not going to pay for those charges anyway, right? There are several reasons that companies do care. A few examples…
-If the employee runs up a large amount of outstanding personal charges on their corporate travel card, then the employee quits or is fired before the employee pays for those purchases, the company might get stuck paying the bill.
-Excessive or increased use of a corporate travel card for personal purchases could be an indication that the employee is under personal financial pressure. Employees who are under personal financial pressure are more likely to commit various types of fraud in the workplace.
It’s important to note here that some companies do allow the occasional use of the corporate travel card for personal purchases in the case of a personal emergency while the employee is traveling on company business. However, most companies strongly discourage the use of the corporate travel card for personal purchases in general, particularly when the purchases aren’t related to an employee’s business travel. So, how can travel managers tell the difference?
The truth is, they usually can’t. Manual audits usually only cover a sample of expenses, and without a full audit of expenses, it’s hard for a travel manager or audit professional to piece together the signs of a non-compliant spending pattern. This is why we recommend customers use our expense audit technology: this way they don’t miss a single expense, and our algorithms can parse together spending patterns and behaviors to help you cut down on non-compliant purchases.
There are a few ways that you can get the benefit of Oversight’s Excessive Personal Insight:
-If you are already an Oversight customer, you can choose to add the Excessive Personal Spend Insight to your list of Insights that you currently run.
-If you are not yet an Oversight customer, then the Excessive Personal Spend Insight will be run for you during an Oversight Test Drive along with other T&E Insights, so that you can evaluate if it is right for your company.
We offer a free test drive of our software using 90 days of your own spending data. Why not give it a try in 2016?
Julia Versaci is Director of Solutions Development at Oversight Systems.