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Reporting and analysis

Reporting capability spans multiple requirements at different levels within every organization, from a line manager’s need to compare expenditure against budget to a finance director’s efforts to analyse aggregate spend. Most systems come with a selection of pre-installed reports and tools to build custom reports: they also allow users to export data to other applications (such as spreadsheets) for further analysis.

From an operational perspective, the core reporting tools should enable analysis of expense and time by category, broken down into organizational segments such as role or region. At a strategic level, the breadth and granularity of drill-down is particularly important – in order to negotiate preferential terms with suppliers, organizations need access to spending trends over time, broken down according to the kind of services and products offered by each potential business partner.

Integration to other systems

The expenses management business process begins with employee claim submission and ends with reimbursement, so easy integration with Financial, Payroll and HR systems is a key requirement.

Where expense management software vendors provide expense tracking systems as one module within a broader set of enterprise software products, they will usually provide ‘out-of-the-box’ links which make it relatively easy to transmit data into their own payroll and financial applications. Most vendors also provide interfaces to commonly-used third party applications to speed up the integration process.

This doesn’t have to be a complex integration, and batch transfer of data will often be sufficient. At the front-end of the process, organizations will want to link to their HR applications so that new hires and terminations are automatically updated in the system, so reducing the set-up and maintenance overhead.