PayStream Advisors has recently published our 2014 Travel and Expense Management (TEM) report and we’re excited to share with you what we’ve found.  Manual data entry continues to rank as the number one challenge that organizations face in the expense management process. PayStream expects this challenge to fizzle away as the use of automated solutions continues to rise—Fifty-five percent of our survey respondents reported using a fully automated solution as their method of submitting expense reports (See figure below). We’ve also noticed over the last three years, the number of organizations using inter-office mail to submit reports and receipts has dropped from 37 to 30 percent.

One finding that should be of particular interest to organizations with a high level of employee mobility is the difference in average costs between survey respondents using fully automated, partially automated, and manual expense report submission methods. The difference between the averages of fully automated and manual reports was calculated to be $12.58. Considering close to 10 percent of respondents also reported to process more than 5,000 expense reports per month—this can be a six-figure difference in costs and therefore a huge opportunity for savings.

Modern TEM solutions continue to advance with groundbreaking mobile applications that make scanning images and populating and submitting reports easier than ever. These allow employees to focus on more important matters at hand such as pleasing a client, attaining a sale, or discussing partnerships. Several leading TEM solution providers helped fund this research and can be found in the latter half of the report. PayStream welcomes you to download a free copy of the report here.