Name: Future-Proof Your Enterprise: Essential T&E Strategies Every CFO Must Act on Now
Uploaded: 2024-11-07T19:29:34.831Z
Duration: 52 min 12 s
Description: Future-Proof Your Enterprise: Essential T&E Strategies Every CFO Must Act on Now

Transcript for "Future-Proof Your Enterprise: Essential T&E Strategies Every CFO Must Act on Now": Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for our webinar, future proof your enterprise, essential teenage strategies and retail know now. Name is Dasha Scoopchenko, and I'm on the marketing team here at Imbirta and your host for today's event. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. This event is being recorded. You will receive the recording after this session. We do encourage you to ask questions, which you can do in the q and a tab, and it's on the right side. We also included some helpful resources for you in the documents tab. Chad is also available today, so feel free to engage with us and your fellow webinar attendees. Participants in this webinar are eligible to earn one CPE credit for attending and participating. To earn the credit, you need to attend the entire webinar, answer all 3 poll questions, and you can expect a verse to follow-up within 7 business days of your certificate. Our presenter today is Adrianna Carpenter. As chief financial officer of Immerse. Adriana is responsible for financial strategy, accounting, treasury, financial planning, and reporting. Adriana has 30 years of finance and accounting experience in various industries. To learn more about her background and to connect with her on LinkedIn, you can check out the speaker staff on the top at any time. And with that, I will pass this off to Adriana to dive into the essential travel and expense strategy. Thanks so much, Dasha, and welcome everyone. Really appreciate everyone attending today. As Dasha mentioned, I'm the CFO of Imbursed. We are an end to end travel and expense management solution company. You can see here a couple of great stats about us. We have over 15,000 customers, we have over 700 employees, we process over $90,000,000,000 in spend annually. So we get a lot of great intelligence by looking at spend trends and really understanding what is happening across the travel and expense management landscape. And so let's talk about what we're seeing. You know, we are seeing and hearing from our customer base that as CFOs and and members of the finance community, we're always and continuing to be expected to do more with less. Right? We want to be driving more profitable growth. Obviously, there's ways to do that. We can grow our top line but there's also, you know, we can control and manage our costs and our spend. And so there's multiple levers to really deliver across that profitable growth profile. We are seeing as a contention to that that, travel expenses globally continue to rise. We are seeing on average about a 3% increase in overall travel costs, but also what's happening in the in the supplier landscape. So think about the airlines, the hotels and and those providers, they are really leveraging and leaning into dynamic pricing. Meaning that, you know, those prices of hotel rooms or airfares, they're changing continuously. And that can make it really challenging as a company to be able to really understand and and have line of sight, into what those travel expenses could be for the future. We continue to see that push towards sustainability, You know, for those of you that are public entities, you know that there is a lot of regs coming out around, tracking your sustainability practices. So that continues to be front of mind as a trend. Hybrid and remote workforce, you know, the pandemic changed things pretty dramatically and we have not seen a shift back to the old way. What has happened is we are seeing employees that are engaging more in spend. And in fact we recently did a survey or excuse me an analysis of $30,000,000,000 of our spend across 6,300 companies. And in looking at that spend, 20% of the spend was related to SaaS and 20% of that SaaS spend was actually transacted by employees paying for the SaaS spend and then asking for reimbursement. 16% of ad spend was also transacted by by the employee and and then reimbursed, you know, processed through a reimbursement. So we're seeing a shift in the types of spend that employees are entering into and that is having a pretty big impact on finance organizations. And lastly, obviously, the proliferation of AI. For those of you I don't know who out there in the audience has become a a pretty big fan of, like, chat GPT. I I frequent it often. But those AI tools and and and the and the broader technology that is avail available to companies is really imprinting itself on the travel and expense landscape. So why does it matter? You know, a recent survey by GBTA back in, at the end of 2023 basically found that over $140,000,000,000 of travel and expense spend is unaccounted for or lost to leakage. So think about the magnitude of that number. That means that most companies if you can manage and reduce the, you know, the type of expenses that are either, you know, not wanted or or being spent in a way in which you don't you don't want to be spent outside of policy, you can really have a dramatic impact, on your cost structure. So it really does behoove us to really think through how do we, how do we address that. And and we also did a recent survey in June of this year across over 500 professionals, across like HR, finance, travel and operations. And these finance or these, 500 professionals, they were, you know, about half of them were from kind of like middle middle to much larger like 500 plus, size organizations. And then the other half were sort of in the mid market into the SMB market. And and we asked these these professionals, we said, you know, help us understand how your company is performing. Are you ahead of your financial targets, behind your financial targets, sort of at right at them? And what we found was a correlation between those companies that said, hey, we think our employees are in compliance with our travel and expense policies. We put these policies out there and we have high confidence that they're that they're in compliance. Those companies tended to be ahead of their financial targets. And those that have confidence that they have the ability to control their travel spend, they also were performing ahead of their financial targets. So it does matter having that confidence that your employees are going to be able to to comply with with the with the policies you're putting in place really can make a difference. So before we delve into our topics, let's, let's take our first polling question. So, so which of the following methods does your organization use to drive compliance on travel and expense policy? You can select as many as you want. Are you automating some manual tasks? Are you using corporate cards with built in spend controls, allowing, employees to book trips with their own preferred airlines? Are you streamlining the experience like pushing, employees to a particular travel or booking platform? Or are you even going the extra mile to relax your policy limits to make it easier for employees to comply? So let's give it just a few minutes or give it a minute here to let people respond here. And we can also leave the poll question open for those of you who joined us a little bit late to qualify for the CPE credit. You do need to answer all 3 poll questions. So polls are located on on the right. So at any point, you can go in, select your choice, and then when we get to the next one, I'll close the first one. But please feel free to send us a chat message if you didn't get to load on one of them, and I'll open them again. Great. So let's see here. So it looks like top of the list here, automating time consuming manual tasks is coming in sort of with the highest level of response, followed by streamlining the employee experience. So basically pushing employees to a corporate travel or or booking program. So Dasha, let's go ahead and close out the polling section and let's come back to so we also, you know, this survey that I talked about of the 500 plus professionals, you know, we're seeing that a similar response in our survey as to what we just saw in the polling, You know, sort of these higher the the highest level of, what are the methods that companies are using, it is automating, some of those manual processes, it's allowing employees to book trips with their preferred airlines, it's streamlining that employee experience. So, pretty much in line with with what we're seeing here from our audience today. So with that backdrop, what are the strategies that you should be acting on today? Well, there's 3 that I wanna talk through today. 1st is you gotta leverage the technology that is available. It's not just about automating workflows. There's so much more that you can be doing to really hone in on the technology available to really drive better business outcomes for your companies. So we're gonna talk about what that looks like. You wanna enable the employee easy button. Look. Your employees, they want to be compliant. Most employees wanna they wanna obey the rules. Right? They wanna follow the right processes. They just struggle to know how to do it. I mean, there's so many times where employees says, look. I need to go buy something. I need to go buy SaaS tool or I need to go, you know, spend some ad money and how do I do that? And they don't even know how to start the process. So you wanna make it easy for your employees to to to act. And then as a finance team, you wanna make sure you have real time access to data and real time being able to really leverage that data effectively. So we'll talk about how do we enable these 3, these three strategies. So let's talk about the first one. How do you leverage that tech? I wanna talk about it in 2 buckets. The first being travel management, travel management bucket, and the second being the expense. So let's talk about travel management. Leading into an end to end travel management platform is really important. And if you think about it, you know, you sort of have your your pre book or your pre trip booking component, which is really here leveraging and standing up some sort of booking tool, right? You need a site where your your employees can go to that is gonna basically allow them, you're gonna feed them the types of fares, like the types of providers or suppliers you want them to book with. If you have corporate fares, you wanna be able to feed them the fares that are available to them. You wanna help them be compliant with what you want them to do by giving it to them through a booking platform. And and also those booking platforms, you wanna be looking for those that are gonna allow you to automatically, like, if you have itineraries or receipts that come at the time of booking, that is gonna pass that through directly into your system so that you're capturing all of that real time. And it's gonna be constantly auditing for the types of fares that that you as a company have decided this is what we want our employees to to participate in and and help them stay compliant. Once you book that trip, this is where you can really start to leverage AI and really leverage, the ability to reshop those fares. So remember at the at the front, I talked about dynamic pricing. This is where you can book a hotel room today and because this dynamic pricing or even airfare, right, that dynamic pricing is happening all the time between when you book and when you actually take your trip, you can actually leverage where this like a reshop tool will actually just automatically look for when is the fare going down, and they will book it instantaneously for you. So without doing anything extra, you're actually just immediately capturing, this is hard dollar savings. This is true cash coming straight to you and to the bottom line. So really great. It also, will provide you and start looking at all of the all of that data. It's gonna be capturing that travel data. Once your employees on the road and they're in the middle of their trip, you know, you wanna be able to be directing your employee and helping them make sure they're compliant with what they're spending while they're on their trip. And so, you know, being able to deploy a travel companion app that is going to sit there with the employee, hey, I saw you just landed at JFK and you're gonna go to, you know, I see your hotel, you're gonna be heading, you know, to to lower Manhattan and there's 3 ways for you to get there. You know, we prefer that you use Uber because we have a corporate rate with Uber and this is how you go. So you're feeding your employee real time data and and prompting them to make sure that as they're making decisions while they're traveling, that they're making the decisions that are in compliance with your policies. It also is a way to provide, you know, really great duty of care to your to your employees. So if they're traveling and, you know, we just saw, you know, a month ago there was, you know, hurricanes and so maybe perhaps you have employees who are traveling and they're stranded in Florida and they're trying to get home, and you can be dialoguing and prompting them through a travel companion app to help make sure that they're gonna get home, safely. So, so travel those travel companions can really help. They can also help with sustainability. So, you know, provide employees with sustainability information, so as they're making choices they can make more sustainable choices to to help leverage that. And then lastly, pre and post audit. You know, what I'm basically, you know, what we hear, pre and post audit, pre and post trip. Here, this is where you're really leveraging all of the data you've been collecting. Right? Because you you sent all your employees through your own booking platform, so you're collecting all of that data there. As they're re shopping, you're getting new data there. You're also getting data while, the employee is actually on the trip, and you're able to actually then audit as you go along throughout that process. 1, are you getting the right corporate rates? So maybe you have a preferred vendor and they're supposed to be giving you a corporate rate and they can, you know, this kind of data can immediately tell you, nope, this is out of compliance or you didn't get the best rate. It can also help feed you information after the fact to change your policies. Hey. I see that, you know, you have this type of spend, you can go to your vendor and negotiate better rates. It also is can enable benchmarking. So it can provide you with, with benchmarks for companies like you to say you pay 10% more than other all the other companies out there. Again, it's a way to start to either leverage your rates or potentially change policies in order to reduce overall spend. So what's an example of this? So this in this example, you know, I wanted to make sure that you're seeing some real life examples of how companies have enabled this. In this particular example, this is a leading corporate media company and they achieved $1,700,000 in hotel spend savings alone just by enabling the reshop, a reshop type technology. So here you can see, you know, they actually had quite a bit of travel volume, but 74,000 bookings, $70,000,000 of hotel spend across across their company. And, you know, they achieved 2, you know, they identified, excuse me, 2,800,000 of potential savings. And what does this mean? But they only captured 1.7. So what that means is you can adopt how you wanna re shop certain components of your spend. So you can elect to say, hey, if there's a hotel that's that's less expensive and it's within 2 blocks of where the the employee had originally booked, we're gonna rebook them. Or you could say, look, I don't want my my employee to to change hotels. I'm gonna let them just I'm gonna only rebook them in the hotel that they exist in, or maybe in a particular chain of hotel. So the way in which you decide to the parameters in which you decide how you want to reshop hotel fares, airfares, that type of thing. You can either identify a lot of savings and then and and make it broader or you can kind of narrow it in and you can still realize quite a bit of savings mean 250 basis points that's that's that's that's meaningful, $1,700,000 And in this instance, you can see the cost to actually to to have the reshop tool was actually, you know, more than covered 6.8 times covered by by the actual cost to for the reshop from the savings. Let's see. As so, Dasha, do we have any questions? I see some questions coming in, but while I'm talking, I haven't been really monitoring. Are there any questions that we should answer in this section before we move on? Oh, here we go. We have an issue we have a question from John Schmidt. Issue with field service teams and being able to make sure that all travel expenses that are billable back to the client are captured, including supporting receipts. Double hit is missing revenue and then eating the expense cost on the p and l when missed. There's a need to verify everything is captured with receipts. So so, we'll talk about this a little bit more in the expense section, but yes, you absolutely can enable technology that will 1, to the extent that you have, certain suppliers, you can get their data directly, direct data feeds that will essentially give you all of the information you need for receipts. In other cases, when employees spend, they'll get direct, alerts. So like on your travel companion app, you would get an alert that says, hey. I just saw that you booked a hotel or or paid for a meal. Please take a picture of the receipt and then they can immediately take that picture of the receipt that then feeds directly back into your into your overall solution. So great question there. Can we add in different terms? For example, government or commercial versus government rates depending on a customer to have bill back. So yes. Also, think about as you as you as you select platforms, you definitely can tag certain expenses to be billed through to certain, you know, to customers or, you know, we have a lot of, like, services services, companies, law firms, consulting firms. They tend to have to have charge codes, if you will, or or ways in which they can tag certain expenses and be able to build those back to to their clients. And absolutely, you wanna enable, a platform that will allow you to sort of pre populate or tag it to whatever those chargebacks are. And then and then similarly, yes, you absolutely can set up policies in your booking tool that basically says, hey, you know, when I'm traveling for this charge code, you can only use a government rate. So I'm gonna feed government rates to my employees as opposed to I can, you know, pick any kind of commercial rate. So there's definitely ways again, you're you're leveraging that data in the in your booking tool to put around the policies and parameters to the to be able to enable that type of, that type of control over your spend. So great questions. So we talked a little bit about the travel side, let's talk about the expense side. So expense, when I'm talking expense, I'm really I'm not talking just reimbursable expense, I'm talking about operating expenses as well. And and as I mentioned sort of at the at the front, right, we're seeing employees, starting to transact more and pay for operating expenses more at the point of sales. So they're the ones, the employees are the ones that are procuring those goods and services and paying for it. And there's some challenges that are involved with that because one, if the employee does it without any kind of preapproval, that could be problematic. Right? Maybe I didn't want the employee to go buy that SaaS tool or or go, you know, procure that desktop or whatever it is that they went and purchased, but I don't know that. I I I as a CFO, I didn't see it happen. They already spent the money and I don't see it till after they they finally file their expense report. So one is visibility into the spend, actually the fact that they spent money that I didn't want them to spend potentially, and then just, you know, being able to prevent spend that that that is unnecessary. You know, those are some of the the big things that we wanna we wanna start to manage. And so when we think about an end to end expense management solution and and how, you know, what are you looking for, Obviously, you wanna enable that automation. Right? So that seems like that's kinda like table stakes. And we saw that in the poll question at the beginning where 25% of you said, hey. Look. You know, I wanna automate. So yes. Okay. So let's check that box. But we also wanna wanna think about with automation changing the way we've automated depending on the type of spend. Right? So we wanna be able to say, look, it's it's, if it's an operating expense, maybe I want preapproval of that spend. If it's a travel or reimbursable type expense, maybe for that I'm okay as long as they're going through my booking tool. Right? And I'm sort of making sure that as they're booking, they're in compliance with my overall travel policies. I'm okay if they're gonna do that, and then I sort of route it afterwards. So you can make these choices based on the types of spend, how you wanna kind of think about that automated workflow if you will. You also wanna be able to leverage, spend control. So, you know, to the extent that, let's say, you do have, someone who wants to, you know, make an operating expense purchase. So I'm an engineer. I wanna go buy this SaaS tool. There's a few things I wanna make sure when I'm buying a SaaS tool. Right? I wanna make sure, 1, I am getting preapproval that I have it in my budget. I I wanna let yes, engineer. I I I am okay with you going and buying that SaaS tool. But you also might want to if it's a brand new vendor, you might wanna route that through security first. I mean, you wanna be able to assess, is this a SaaS tool we actually wanna we wanna procure that we can use in house because we think it's secure and so there might be a process in which you wanna route them through a security approval flow before you actually then say, okay yes now you can buy it. But then once they buy it you might wanna be able to say, okay I'm gonna issue you either a virtual card or a physical card, but I only want you to buy that thing so I'm gonna actually put controls on that card that only allows you to maybe it's, you know, maybe you have to pay for it monthly and it's for a year. So I'm gonna set up this card for 12 months, it's gonna allow you to pay the vendor a $100 a month for your SaaS tool. Maybe I'm gonna say it can only be used for a particular vendor, but there are ways in which you can actually enact technology across a payment method in order to prevent or reduce or limit what their what the employee is gonna procure and buy. Mobile first, you wanna make sure your employees, because we're remote, because we're hybrid, we might be on the road while we're while we're doing this. We wanna make sure that it's easy for them to use it. So think about how you're enabling that that mobile experience and make sure that the employee has access to be able to transact all the ways they need to, while also allowing you as the CFO or the finance professional to have the appropriate controls in place. And then AI, you know, next gen tech, there's so many ways we can leverage this. The easiest piece and I think it sort of relates to a little bit the question that John just had which is receipt capture, invoice capture. You wanna be able to enable, you you know, gone are the days you're like entering stuff manually. You wanna be able to just take a picture of receipt. You should be able to have the, you know, I I I think here it mentions OCR, so optical character recognition. Basically, what that means is you're gonna take a picture of the receipt. It's gonna the the engine is gonna read it. It's gonna populate it, it's gonna know this is a restaurant, it's in, I don't know, such and such country, it's in this currency, you know, this is the amount of what was spent, it should be able to read the taxes versus the regular, you know, versus the actual core part of the expense. So it's gonna dissect all the pieces of information you need. So that then it that data will then pre populate, automate some of your expense reporting or however you need it to to feed into your ledger. So you again, you wanna be able to enable all of that, through that additional technology. And then you wanna be able to use that data that you have, again, to to to benchmark against others and really start to identify. It's great that you can do and make an experience easier. What's even better is when you can get other information that's either validating the policies you have in place, the rates you have in place, these are all best in class or, hey, there's there's additional levers that can go pull in order to actually reduce some spend here. This is just basically just talking about what I was talking about how it's really important that we that that we acknowledge and understand that our employee base is spending, they're spending things and they're procuring goods and services that they hadn't historically. And so we're just continuing to see that rise in employees making those point of sale purchases, which is really spending your operating expense dollars. And really as finance professionals we think about that type of spend differently, and so we wanna make sure we're gonna enable our employees to be compliant with the type of controls we want over that spend. So the reason why it's showing this is as you think about leveraging automated workflows and things of that nature, you wanna be able to enable those different, those different approval processes or or control processes depending on the type of spend. So as I described earlier, to the extent that maybe it's a reimbursable, it's travel costs, And and I am and I have enabled my end to end travel platform. So I'm confident that my employees booked in in accordance with my policy. So they're booking with the preferred vendors, they're taking the right class of fare, fare class, excuse me, for for airfare, then I'm gonna route for approval or maybe I'm gonna auto approve because it's within parameters and I don't even, you know, and I'm using my AI to audit to audit it automatically and kick out anything that looks unusual. And so if it if it passes all of the tests, then it's a no touch, low touch for finance and and off it goes and reconciles to the ledger. If it's an operating expense, that I wanna make sure my employees guided to say, no. No. That has to go through preapproval. What type of spend is it? Oh, it's marketing. Okay. Then I just need to make sure finance is approved for that it's within your budget. Right? That your manager, whatever. However you wanna set up your policies. And so you're gonna route it differently depending on marketing. If it's a SaaS tool, maybe again, I want it to go through security and then back to finance. And then however you however you wanna structure your policies, know that like an like a true platform should be able to let you guide you and guide your employee through that experience based on that type of spend and how you wanna manage and control that spend. Oh, so let's see. Wait. We have a question here. Do you have a feel for usage of virtual cards versus physical cards on travel spends? Seems like you don't have to tap capability on the phone credit card system. Virtual cards may be more difficult to use WebTrack. So depends on the location. So the the real question here is, you know, can you use virtual cards while traveling? Hotels still will not take most. I I I mean, maybe there's a few that will take it, but most hotels will not take virtual cards. So you do have to issue physical cards. Now you realize now physical cards can still maintain or have similar controls in place that you have, for virtual cards, probably not as robust, but you could still limit the use of physical cards. Virtual cards or even your wallet, those you can continue to issue, depending on where you're at. Again, you can use virtual cards or or your, e wallet to pay for meals, pay for, you know, Uber and and other type of of, of spend. Europe tends to be much more progressive in in what they, what they adopt like from an e card or a virtual card and and wallet payment method, and the US is a little bit behind. So, yes, you do have to be cognizant of what is your employee using using the card for and make sure that you're either issuing a physical card or virtual card and and and adapt based on the type of spend. So great question. Again, this is this is from the survey that we took in June. And again, it's highlighting the fact that those companies that are really leaning in and and really leveraging sort of these end to end techniques that they're that they have a lot more confidence that their employees are spending the money and the funds that they want and that they have the appropriate controls in place and those are the companies that are, you know, correlating to being ahead of financial targets. And, you know, again as a CFO, I always feel better knowing that I have those controls in place and visibility into the spend. So a couple of examples of how companies utilize these end to end platforms and what are the results they're getting. So here you can see 6, they're a rental car company. If you've never rented from 6, they always have these really great like a BMW or Mercedes or whatever at pretty reasonable rates. So highly recommend. I used them in my last trip, so just a little shout out to them. But, so 6, they actually reduced a lot of their processing times. They they had a lot of FTEs that were just associated with transacting and helping employees get through a reimbursable kind of expense reporting process. And you can see here, they reduced from 8 to 3, the number of FTEs required to to to manage their process. They they actually made it a much better user experience for their employees, reducing it, you know, from 8 hours. Think about this. Right? I don't know how many of you out there travel frequently, and if you do your own expense reports or if you have an EA who does them, but like processing your own expense report, you know, to to to take hours and hours and hours, that's time your employees could be spent doing something else. So enabling, you know, the use of data, feeding that data into a tool that's gonna automatically create something or even prevent an expense report. I mean, there are ways in which you can enable your platform again to say, I don't even need the employee to file an expense report. If it's this type of spend, I have a copy of the receipt. Maybe in some cases, it was preapproved, so I've already pre tagged my expenses to the GL, to the right account. I know exactly where it's going. Then once the spend occurs, because I have all of these things already in place, just post automatically to the GL as long as those parameters remain the same. So there's many ways that you can really think and leverage these types of platforms to really get to low touch, no touch, super reduced streamline processes. And this was all, you know, done within 3 months of go live on their system. So again, being able to leverage those systems pretty quickly is is is really a great a great factor here. Databricks, really fast growing company. You know, they went through some major transformations as they really adopted this end to end expense platform. You know, they they had a pretty manual process before. They would choose their reimbursement time from 27 days, like, can you imagine waiting for your money for 27 days to 4 and a half? So fantastic. But even better, they here leveraged the data that they were seeing to say, you know what? Our policies are not aligned with where we need to be. We're gonna change some of these policies and then we're going to use the technology, the platform to make sure we're managing to those new policies, they were able to save $1,200,000 that's a significant amount of money. They were able to reduce the time they spend on audit by 70%. Again, leveraging not just the rule engine within but then the analytics and the AI that that can surround that rules engine around your policies to really evaluate the spend that's coming through to really identify and and and, anomalies and then reduce the time that you're spent, going after those anomalies because they're you're reducing, like, the false positives and the things like that to make it much more efficient. And then here, they actually then changed some of their policies because they were finding areas, both through benchmarking and just through overall analytic analysis of areas where they could tighten things up. So really great, great success story here. And so so strategy number 2, enable the employee easy button. So before we get to that, let's go to poll question number 2. Are any of these categories a concern in your organization when it comes to travel and expense experience? Select all that apply. So employees booking out a policy due to restricted policy or spend levels. I'm sure none of us have ever seen any employee go outside of our booking tool or outside of our process to book with their preferred by their preferred airline or hotel. Cumbersome tools that negatively impact the productivity of employees. Employee dissatisfaction with the spending policies or the level in which they're allowed to spend. Employees spending on unnecessary expenses. You know, we do actually just a quick little plug for we we sometimes, issue, like the craziest expenses that we've seen come through our platform. We usually issue that annually, so be on the lookout for that. That's always a fun read to see what employees spend sometimes through through the platforms that we see. And then spending policy exceptions are unclear. That's a that's a tough one, right, where the the employee doesn't even know how to comply. I don't even understand what this policy is. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing here. So so it looks like, yeah, some of the top votes here, employees spending out a policy, and then cumbersome tools, yeah, that takes a lot of time, and then employees spending on unnecessary expenses. So again, we spend a lot of time as finance professionals with an audit team either combing through expense reports looking for these things. We try to try to enable, you know, faster ways to do it and this is really where you want to leverage that technology. So, Dasha, let's go ahead and close that out so we can get back to the presentation. So so where have we seen? Oh, here we go. Thank you. I was like so so in the in the in the in the study that we did back in June, you know, you're seeing similar responses to what we just saw on the poll question is to sort of where companies have concerns around t and e, around the t and e experience. So in this case, you know, how do you make it easy for your employee? You need to be thinking about ways that you you take the employee through the journey without them having to make decisions, meaning that, you know, employees should be able to go to one place, say, I need to buy something, either a trip, a SaaS tool, a something, and you're you're then routing them through the process based on the policies you have in place. So the employee doesn't have to go figure out, oh, I gotta go read the t and e policy, you know, the travel the travel policy to tell me what I'm allowed to do. They should be able to go to your booking tool and just be able to do it on their own. They should be able to go to one app and be able to manage all of this on their own. And so General Mills is a great example of a company that, you know, think about how many employees they have. They have employees all over the world, really vast, and they were really having the tough time getting everyone, wanting to understand the policies and the and the and the, and to be compliant. Right? And so General Mills really leveraged this employee companion app where they really put everything through that app and then fed everything to the employees real time. And you can see here, you know, they were able to really improve adoption of their overall policies and compliance and deliver it in a way that the employees were compliant and they love the app. 5 out of 5 ratings. So, you know, this is really a company that can that really thought about how do I make this employee experience easy while also making sure that they're doing what I what we want them to do as a company. Alright. Strategy number 3, and I wanna make sure I save a few minutes for q and a. Activate real time finance visibility. So important. If we don't know what our employees are spending money on, when they're spending money, we have no ability to manage and control that money. And again, as finance professionals, that's not a position we wanna be in. The more visibility we have, the better off we are because then we can adapt and design and figure out, okay, I need to I need to change what we're doing because what what I'm seeing isn't what I was expecting or maybe it's not delivering the right business outcome that I want and so I need to be able to adapt and change. And so that visibility is really important. So poll question number 3. How would you rate your ability to report on travel and expense spend? So do you have real time reporting on every single t and e category? And think about this too. Remember at the top how I how we talked about I talked about the types of spend that are going through expense portals now. It's different. It's not just reimbursable spend. You're starting to see a lot more operating expenses that the employees are procuring. So do you really have that level of visibility? And, you know, we have real time reporting on some of the categories, but maybe not all. We can report on every category, but not in real time. So I can download a report at the end of the month, but I can't do it, like, today. Just go into my portal and take a look at where is everything, from a spend perspective. And then same thing. So we can report on some but not, some categories, not all, right, but also not in real time. So it looks like the majority of the votes here are coming in. We can report on every category but not in real time. That feels familiar. Right? It's that real time that can be really challenging. So, Dasha, let's head back to the main deck here. So we've got our end to end travel. We've got our end to end expense. Guess what we have when we do that? Right? We're also managing a lot of the payments. We're doing the payments through our own payment process. We have access to a ton of data. And you know what that means? You can leverage analytics, AI, audit. You can do all of these things with that data, and you can do it with very little effort from your own team. Right? And so you are looking for the types of tools that will give you real time dashboards. Right? They're gonna give you access to drill down capabilities. They're gonna look for patterns of your spend. They're gonna look for benchmarks of your spend. They're gonna look for similar types of spend that will feed you, hey, guess what? You have 5 SaaS vendors. You know, I think one of the most interesting things, and we see this across a lot of our customers, is that when they are going in and for the first time really looking at the types of spend that are going through their systems, through their expense platforms, they realize, oh, even though a lot of things were classified as I mean, maybe it's classified as miscellaneous or whatever, You find all kinds of operating expense spend that you didn't even know existed. And so it's really important to 1, identify it, then start to understand, well, how do I either prevent it, limit it, or I wanna make that type of spend go through a different spend or control process so that I have better controls on the front end to to make sure that I'm in agreement with the type of spend that's happening. And then also, you know, in a lot of cases because this is employee spend it's not going through procurement. I mean think about how valuable your procurement function is when you have and particularly when you're trying to consolidate vendors or just consolidate multiple buys across departments. You got 5 departments all buying Adobe, and then if you packaged all that up and went to Adobe and and basically negotiated different rates, you could actually save quite a bit of spend. So the types of analytics we're talking about here are things that will allow you to take action. You're changing policies, you're changing changing vendors, you're negotiating different rates, you're gonna put in a new control to pre approve versus post approve. All of these things that will allow you to manage and and and realize better expenses or, better results. This is just another version of looking at, like, who says that they have really great, like, visibility and ability to act on on their spend and report on their spend. And and, like, if the glue is good, everything else is we we have room to grow, so there's a lot of room to grow. So what's an example of this? This is so International Services Inc. They they have a lot of people in the fields in the field. Right? And so they had employees that were out there spending just a little bit every every single one of them. And they didn't really have visibility into all the things that were happening and all the ways in which they those employees were spending. This company, again, implementing end to end these end to end systems and then having that real time visibility was able to very quickly hone in on areas that they can make changes, capturing $2,000,000 annually, 500 k in the 1st 3 months. Think about that return. Like, I'll take $2,000,000 annually any day of the week. So like and then and then also automating the whole process. Right? Making everything faster, easier, that provides a ton of employee satisfaction as well and takes a huge lift off of your finance and travel organization. So you know, another really great success story here when you really leverage that end to end tool. So gonna wrap up here and save a few minutes here for q and a. But so as you're, you know, as we're wrapping up just key takeaways, just, you know, lean into thinking about how you enable that full end to end all the way from travel all the way through expense and don't limit yourself and your views to thinking about reimbursable expense only. You really should think broader about all the ways that company spends money outside of payroll. And how do you leverage solutions that will capture all of that, help you automate as much as you can, implement controls, structures around that to to really drive the type of spend that you want, and then help you leverage that data into analytics. And and remember, it's gotta be actionable that is gonna allow you to modify your policies, your, you know, take action in order to really drive results to your bottom line. So with that, Dasha, what other questions do we have? How do you balance policy restrictions spend controls with employee satisfaction? Employees wanna make sure look, most employees, they just wanna do their jobs. So it is it is trying to help them make sure that they're compliant. Now you gotta also think about the employee experience. So remember when I was talking about the re shop optionality where, okay, you could literally take the cheapest rate of a hotel, let's say within, I don't know, a 5 minute walk of wherever your employee was. But if you really did that and you start putting employees maybe in hotels that aren't that great or maybe not in the best location, you know, you really are sacrificing employee potential well-being, but for sure some employee morale. So you do have to balance that. You have to look at it not just through the lens of what how much money can I save? Because, man, I could save a ton, but then I have them at, you know, motel 8 or whatever, or some, you know, motel by the side of the highway, and I don't, you know, I don't know what employee wants to, you know, have hear, like, big rig trucks going by all night long. Right? So so you you gotta balance sort of that employee experience with the value of the business and then also you want to help the employees understand. So if you are going to make a pretty dramatic change to a policy you want to make sure you have the communications around that. So you wanna be able to be transparent with your employee base. Here's what we're doing. Here's why we're doing it. Here's how it values the company. Here's how it values you. So make sure you're thinking about it through those lenses. What else we got? Where do you tend to see t and e and the software manage? Procurement, AP, financial accounting, etcetera. Usually, what we see is finance is gonna own the structure or the controls, the makeup, the process of the experience. If you're a little bit bigger company, you have like a travel group, they're gonna kind of own that front end travel piece and it's gonna be combined with finance that's owning sort of the expense side. And when I say finance I include it with procurement. It's gonna be you're gonna have to have your key stakeholders that are defining the key requirements, the controls you want in place, like they have to be a party at the table. It's gonna depend on you the company how you want to administer it. Typically you have a financial systems group that is administering the tool, but it's those stakeholders, the travel group if you have it, procurement, finance that are kind of defining what that looks like. And don't forget about your employees that are the users. You want to put yourself in the employee shoes and so you wanna be getting that that feedback from your employees what they'd like or you can also ask a preferred, you know, the vendor who is providing you with the platform. They usually have a lot of experience of, hey, we see the highest employee satisfaction with this type of structure, this type of arrangement. So leverage your provider as well, of these end to end tools to give you that type of visibility and and and advice. Are you seeing a trend specifically in the US where organizations are placing a hard per diem for employee meals while traveling instead of just providing recommended limits? We don't see that trend very often. It I would say it it is more it depends on the industry. So you'll tend to see, like, those tied more to government or, where they will have hard limits. Higher ed, we see that in a lot. You don't see it as much say in the corporate side. So, you know, sort of in the, you know, like in tech or consulting, things things of that nature. Those tend to be more softer per diem limits. But again, it comes down to if you really wanna tighten things up, you can tighten as much as you want. But then again, it's this trade off between, you know, satisfaction of your employees, then you better really have a really good explanation and help your employee base understand the the why, what you're doing and why you're doing that. K? What else? We are at time. Oh, we're at time. Okay. Thank you so much for your incredible presentation, and thank you to everyone for attending today. We will have one more webinar in December, so definitely keep an eye out for those last, ICP credits coming in. But thank you so much, Adriana. Any closing statements before we let everyone go? Look. I'd say lean in as much as you can. There is real value to be had here. Really think broad. Take take you know, go all in and really deliver those business outcomes to your business. It's worth it and you'll, you know, you could be a hero. So so, good luck and thank you so much for attending. Thanks for the for the great questions and the interaction even though we were on a webinar. So really appreciate it. Have a great day everyone.