Expense Technology Gets Smarter as Providers Look Beyond Receipts
Photo Credit: Attendees eating lunch at The Conference 2017. Strong analytics and better booking tools are leading to an easier expense process for business travelers. Flickr / Media Evolution
Skift Take
Beyond automatically integrating travel booking with expenses, a lot is being done to give travel managers and financial departments more powerful tools to track spending. It also helps that these tools will eventually make the expense report process much easier for travelers.
Completing an expense report after a business trip still tends to be a long and annoying process for most business travelers.
Getting reimbursed for that soggy croissant at the airport can hardly seem worth it, given how contrived the corporate expense process can be. Tracking down your receipts, taking photos, uploading them to a clunky app, and then dealing with the torturous agony of hoping for a quick approval is not a fun process to repeat again and again.
While many companies have graduated to using apps instead of spreadsheets, there's still a long way for expense technology providers to go in search of a truly seamless experience for users.
Businesses are now looking for solutions that integrate expense management with more robust analytics, and once-conservative expense management technology companies are experimenting to bring more powerful tools to market.
Integrated travel booking tools were only the beginning of the evolution in what expense providers envision
