As the CEO of Oversight Systems, I particularly loved this post on Click Travel about “6 Things Your CEO Wants to Know About Business Travel.” Since Oversight caters to T&E, P-Card, and P2P programs that are often heavily comprised of travel expenditures, I thought I’d weigh in. There is a solution that can tell CEO’s in industry exactly what they need to know about their company’s business travel spending, and it is called Oversight Insights On Demand™.
#1 -They Want to Know How Much Is Being Spent
As the CEO you’re going to get a lot of questions, especially around financials. Your CFO or Comptroller should let you know how much you’re spending across each area or department, but one of the real challenges is the data itself. For instance to know how much you spent with Marriott you probably want to look at the spend across all of their properties – Residence Inn, JW Marriott, SpringHill Suites etc. As part of our analysis service we transform the transactions from your expense management system (like Concur, Oracle or Chrome River) into a structured data model. This enables us to deliver our advanced analysis and it also makes our dashboards a great place to get an accurate view of your spend.
#2 & #3 – They Want to Know What They’re Spending Money On and Why
Manual audits usually only cover a small sample of employee spending, and T&E departments are often overburdened as it is without looking at every single expense line. Employing a technology solution that can analyze 100% of transactions is a great way to scrutinize every dollar your company spends.
#4 & 5 – Where Can We Save Money and Who Are Our Bad Actors
Not to sound like a broken record, but Oversight Insights On Demand™ was built specifically to find areas of wasted spending. Not only do we provide analysis, but our integrated case management tool and dashboards allow you to see specifically who the top offenders are in each department and their history and patterns of waste (or worse) over time.
#6 - What Are Our Industry Competitors Doing and What Can We Learn?
The advent of cloud based software offers many benefits to users. First, the cloud allows us to spread the cost of analysis over many customers, thus lowering the cost for the service. Also, cloud data storage allows for benchmarking statistics based on data from many companies. By having statistics from many different sets of data, we give our customers benchmarking like never before. This allows CEOs to see if what they are spending on is useful to the business, provides context around ways to reduce business costs, and see if their spending is in line with industry best practices.
The big point, and I’m not just saying this because I’m the CEO of Oversight, is that if you want to learn everything there is to know about your business travel spending and leverage it to make better business decisions, you NEED both the analysis and an automated compliance solution, and that’s just what we provide with Insights On Demand. Click here to find out more about our expense audit solution.
