UNDERSTAND

T&E MANAGEMENT
AND MAKE IT THE MOST

EFFICIENT PROCESS
IN YOUR COMPANY
INTRODUCTION
There’s only one thing you can say for sure about travel and expense management —
they’re always changing. As a CFO, travel manager or accountant, you’re trying to stay
in touch with everything that’s happening in the industry and make the right decision for
your company, but it can be hard to keep up when things are moving this fast.

One good thing is, we are here to help.

Travel and Expenses are the 2nd most significant expenditure for most companies.
Rightfully so, when evaluating T&E management solutions, we often approach it with a
cost-driven motivation rather than experience-driven one.

But they don’t have to be dissociated.

We’ve come a long way from the days where only experts could operate a computer.
Yet, in many companies, we still end up dealing with proprietary software that hasn’t
been updated since the 90’s or get stuck in endless reply-all email threads — or any
other unfortunate results of bad technological implementation.

Lots of companies don’t take into account the usability of the programs they give their
employees to work with and use. It is especially the case for large businesses and
multinational companies. However, improving this situation can have a tremendous
impact on the productivity and profitability of the team — for expense management only,
implementing a modern, user-friendly tool can cut by 75% the time spent on this task.

1
Introduction
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Expense Management 3

1 - Understanding the impact of manual Expense management 4

2 - Embracing a SAAS solution 4

3 - Future-proof solution 5

Corporate Travel Management 7

1 - Why corporate travel needs an update 8

2 - New solutions for the new generation of corporate travel 9

3 - Future-proof solution 11

Conclusion 13

2
Table of contents
EXPENSE MANAGEMENT
Expense management is one of the most disregarded processes in companies. Always
pushed to the side when it comes to process updates and evolution. But what most
companies fail to understand is that expense management can be the easiest way
to reduce costs and ease the lives of their employees. The very act of digitizing your
receipt - by taking a picture of it, unlocks a fascinating number of options. The days of
cumbersome manual expense management processes are consigned to history.

A ‘mobile first’ expense management process based on a digital receipt can empower
companies to unlock data that will help inform better decision making. Shuffling expense
reports around can become a thing of the past, as expenses are managed in real time,
transforming the way companies operate.

How?

Quite Simple.

Most employees are frustrated by manual expense management in companies and the
more outdated it is, the more vulnerable the company is to fraud. By automating your
expense processes and putting in place platforms that allow you to have immediate
enforcement of expense rules, your company can achieve up to 750% ROI and reduce
the time spent on expense management by 4. It may sound like a dream, but it’s not.

So let’s take a look at how you can transform your bottom line with expense
management.

3
Expense Management
1 - Understanding the impact of manual Expense
management
Most of the steps and hand-offs involved in a traditional expense claiming process are
repetitive and ineffective, exposing companies to several human errors: out of every 100
steps, a human is likely to make 10 errors.

Manually filling expense reports, stapling receipts, approving stacks of papers,

reconciling expenses with credit card statements, etc. all of these steps make expense
management a tedious process and translates in frustrated employees wasting valuable
time on tiresome tasks.

With such process, finance teams also lack visibility in real-time spending making
companies very vulnerable to compliance breaches. The cost of manual expense
management is rarely calculated but hides tremendous savings opportunities.

Manual Expense Reporting at a glance

Time Money Non compliant

20 min 53€ 19%

is the time average to is the average cost of pro- is the time average percent
complete an expense report. cessing an expense report. of reports with errors. It costs
48€ to correct.

Aside from the laborious tasks, expense reimbursement also represents 14% of all asset
misappropriation fraud schemes within companies.

A fraud that 80% of European companies are experiencing due to their paper-based
processes. In some companies, random and regular checks are put in place to prevent
such fraud, but this solution is not foolproof for duplicates and compliance checks.

2 - Embracing a SAAS solution

A new wave of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions like those offered by Rydoo has
the potential to transform how expenses are managed in companies. Digitizing the
receipt represents the mere tipping point though. The power that is unlocked as a result
is the key.

4
Expense Management
By eliminating manual interventions and automating processes, companies can reduce
the number of lost receipts, automate compliance checks and reduce fraud risks.

Employees scan their receipts using their mobile phone, and the platform automatically
extracts all the relevant data using OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition). The
receipts are allocated to the right cost center, and general ledger and are available to
review in real-time by managers and finance teams.

Expenses can be approved or rejected as soon as they are uploaded by the employees
using the mobile or web applications. In numbers, expense automation could land you
with a 70% decrease in processing cost, 75% time saved and more satisfied employees:
Deloitte Belgium saves 2500 billable man-hours each month with Rydoo.

Digital expense platforms are also designed to recognize patterns and provide insights
and visibility on your company’s spending. All, in just a few clicks.

Reports detailing out-of-policy expenses, departments’ spending habits, users’ analysis,

can all be created within the platform, giving you actionable insights to take action and
instantly correct behavior or reassess budgets.

The Rydoo Way

Receipt Manage your Integrated

on the go expenses accounting
snap pictures of receipts using approve and control all expenses Export all your reports to your ERP or
the mobile app. The OCR extracts using via the web or mobile app. accounting software.
necessary data.

3 - Future-proof solution
How do you ensure that you invest in an expense tool that won’t be out-of-date next
year? There’s nothing worse than migrating to a new tool only to have to do the same
process 12 months later because your needs have changed.

5
Expense Management
There are three ways to ensure this won’t happen to you:

Choose a scalable solution – When implementing a SaaS platform for your expense
management, you should be able to independently handle the everyday use and update
of the platform. Adding 50 new users should be as easy as adding 5 and certainly
shouldn’t take 10x as long. And you should be able to change policies, roles, and flows
by merely logging in into the platform. A scalable solution will ensure the platform you
implemented is relevant regardless of how quickly your business grows and change.

Look at the evolution of the platform in the past 2 years – Your provider should
be passionate about the solution they are offering, continuously updating it to meet
the latest standards and requirements. 18 2 - How to choose the Right Expense
Management Platform Don’t be afraid to ask about the evolution of the platform 2 years
ago. It will allow you to assess whether the teams are continually working to improve and
innovate or are merely relying on their previous achievements.

Anticipate your future needs – Every company works to grow and evolve. It’s probably
your case as well. Look at your company’s objectives for the next 5 years to understand
what will be needed to align and help your teams achieve success. Confirm that the
platform you are looking into will be able to answer those needs.

The power of well-designed expense management solutions is to drive significant

changes in the way companies view the process. It transforms from a burdening manual
process into an endorsement of the company’s digital transformation and innovation.

9 2

6
Expense Management
CORPORATE TRAVEL
MANAGEMENT
If Georges Clooney is the quintessential business traveler in the movie “up in the air.”
Most business still did not figure out how to offer the best possible experience to their
business travelers while keeping an eye on the costs.

It is not an easy task.

Changing travel trends combined with the complexity of current travel management
leaves a lot of room for improvement, and that’s why modern travel management tool
such as Rydoo are gaining popularity.

Companies are increasingly seeing the benefits of using a travel management platform
for booking flights and hotels. This way, their employees can use a single platform for all
their corporate travel needs, making it easier for them to schedule, manage and track
every part of their trip from one place. Employers benefit as well — they get access to
better deals and can more easily keep track of the company travel budget.

The challenge remains to find the perfect fit with a corporate booking tool. It all starts
and ends with defining the services you want to offer to your employees.

7
Corporate Travel Management
1 - Why corporate travel needs an update
Even though things are changing faster than ever before, some companies are still stuck
in the past — especially when it comes to travel management. While consumers have
long had access to powerful online tools to book their trips, some businesses are still
hanging on to the past — with old legacy platforms and relying on travel agencies to
manage their travels.

Because travel has long been in the hands of procurement departments, they driving
decision making argument was fee pricing — it doesn’t matter much if the end user
actually likes the service. For very long, several companies offered a very poor user
experience and a very limited mobile one, making it complicated for people to get in
touch with the service while they’re on the road.
While a cheap solution with little attention for the user can be tempting, it can have a big
impact on the companies spending and visibility.And when offline bookings are involved,
the fees start skyrocketing.
Also when looking at the figures, a significant number of business travelers prefer using
other option than the company’s solution to book business trip: 30% of hotel bookings
are done outside of the company recommended channels.

HOTEL RESERVATION LAG AIR ADOPTION

What percentage of hotel reservations made by your organization’s

U.S.-based travelers are booked through company-sponsored booking
channels, including preferred online booking tool and/or travel
management company?

Average

Organizations That Mandate

Organizations That Strongly

67% Encourage
61%
59%
44% Organizations That Lightly
Encourage

SOURCE: The Beat survey of 159

corporate travel buyers with at least
$500,00 in U.S.-booked air volumne,
conducted in August 2017.

8
Corporate Travel Management
This means that the attachment rates are low and this can often be linked to more
significant underlying issues, which are worth exploring on their own.

When people are booking elsewhere, your company is making losses on a couple of
things. One of these comes from the fact that it’s impossible to bargain for good deals
with hotel chains and travel agencies when nobody is booking through your engine.
Something that could end up costing a lot more is the processes that come after the
booking. They can stack up to become quite expensive, as the payment first needs
to be submitted as an expense, then processed by the right department and finally
reimbursed.

It involves hours of work by various teams, and it ends up as an administrative mess

because it’s hard to keep a comprehensive overview of all spending — which in turn
has to be cleaned up by the financial department. They need to combine documents
from various sources to create the full picture that’s required to comply with the finance
department.

Then there are the security issues. When your employees book on their own, they’re
not giving you access to all travel information. The location where they’re staying,
for example, isn’t necessarily shared with the office, which can have significant
consequences if something wrong happens.

In the case of an accident, a natural disaster or another security issue it’ll take a lot
longer for the company to locate their employees, which can put them in a hazardous
situation.

2 - New solutions for the new generation of corporate travel

The next generation of corporate travel tools is an answer to the new generation of
business travelers. Nobody born after the 70s wants to call someone to arrange a trip —
if you can’t offer a user-friendly online platform to your employees, you’re bust.

Online check-in, social media customer support, and a modern user interface are just a
couple of things they’re looking for in a travel product.

When you’re giving your employees the freedom to book their travels, they need to have
powerful options to manage them. For travelers, it’s vital to be able to compare prices
on different possibilities, edit their bookings and change or cancel flights to get a quick
refund.

9
Corporate Travel Management
And as a travel manager, you also need to determine what are the rules you want to
implement.

Do you want people to take flights everywhere they need to go, or can they also book a
train? When they’re staying overnight, do they get a hotel or an Airbnb? Do you want to
support more options, like taking a ferry or renting a car? When you’ve figured this out,
you can look for a tool that has the options you need.

Platform usability is key

When looking for a corporate booking tool, we often overlook the experience for the
end user — the product’s services and feature set are often deemed more important.
It’s important to realize, however, that even the most powerful tool can become utterly
useless in the hands of people who don’t know how to use it.

If you’re implementing a self-booking system, it should be accessible to anyone in

the company — and that means being aware of other people’s technical abilities.
Unfortunately, lots of corporate booking tools have an interface that picks function over
form, leaving users with a jumbled mess of unintuitive menus and hard-to-find controls.
Not everyone across a large organization is well-versed in using technology, and this can
become an issue when they need to book their travel.

Good design can make a difference. Picking a booking tool with an interface that’s easy
to understand is the best way to make sure anyone can use it. If employees are often on
the move, the mobile experience should be great as well — either by having a functional
app or an optimized website for smartphones.

10
Corporate Travel Management
The importance of customer support
Every new product has a learning curve, and your team will inevitably spend some time
learning how to use it. The problem is that most of the questions will end up with the IT
department, which can take up much of their valuable time.

That’s why it makes sense to pick a corporate travel tool that has stellar customer
support — employees need to be able to send any questions directly to the product’s
support team, preferably in a user-friendly way like an integrated chat tool.

Implementing your approval process

Your business might be swimming in money, it might be strapped for cash, or it could
be somewhere in between. Depending on your budgets and travel policy, you need to
decide who gets to approve travel requests. Make sure to look for a platform that allows
managers to quickly determine if certain trips are allowed, or has a system that checks
requests automatically.

Book anywhere, at anytime No payment needed with Fast Check-in,

Central Billing Check-out

Happy employees, Instant spending overview

Higher attachment rates

3 - Future-proof solution
With Rydoo, we set out to create a platform for business travel that works for everyone.
It’s beautifully designed, easy to use and offers a dedicated mobile experience to use
during your trip. You’re always in control, whether you’re a manager setting the booking
options for your team or an employee changing an early morning flight to one in the
afternoon.

11
Corporate Travel Management
Mobile and online booking: You and your team only need to use one tool for all your
travel needs, booking flights, hotels, trains, cars and with the best deals available. When
the time comes to pay, you’re in for a surprise — you can opt for the no payment phase!

Central billing: All transactions go through our central billing system, saving your
employees valuable time during their check-in to their hotel, as they won’t have to pull
out their credit card anymore. At the end of the month we send one consolidated invoice
listing all travels made by your employees, ready to be booked into your accounting
system — it couldn’t be easier for the financial department.

High attachment rates: We’re mixing corporate features with the design mentality of
a commercial platform. It’s all about bringing the years of evolution in consumer tools
to the corporate world, creating a platform that’s both intuitive and powerful. We make
sure not to limit users to a small selection of flights and hotels. Instead, we incorporate
content from around the web, including the best deals from portals like Booking.com
and Expedia — this way, your employees can find something they like.

We make corporate travel easy for employees and comprehensive for travel managers
— and we’ll always have your back.

12
Corporate Travel Management
CONCLUSION
There is no doubt that Travel and Expense management is one of the most tedious tasks
in a company and either positive or negative, all the employees feel its impact. Many
companies still rely on legacy systems and manual processes that are very ineffective
and very frustrating for users. Most of these legacy systems are not build for future
needs and don’t support growth, making it hard for companies to get out of the “old way
of thinking” and change or improve their processes.

It’s time to look outside the comfort zone and think about improving the experience of
travel and expense for your company and colleagues.

The advantage of introducing a modern T&E tool can be felt instantly across the entire
company. Employees enjoy a seamless experience through user-friendly platforms while
finance teams have better visibility on spending and more actionable insights. It’s a win-
win situation.

13
Conclusion
Rydoo reinvents and simplifies your travel and expense management to just a few clicks
and photos, whilst saving time and optimizing costs. Our complete solution integrates an
intuitive booking service for business travellers with central billing and a unique tool that
allow employees to expense on the go.

Rydoo is the first mobile app that clears away administrative tasks for employees and
finance team, giving people more time to focus on what matters.