inSight procurement and expense

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£xpense Brochure
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Most companies have hundreds or thousands of personal expense claims every month; can your paper-based system handle this? Employee initiated expenses represent a significant percentage of your companies total spending. Aberdeen research shows that travel and entertainment (T&E) expenses, the primary items submitted through the expense process, account for 5-20% of all indirect spending.
On average, indirect expenditures represent 30-60% of expenses at companies, so employee initiated expenses represent a significant percentage of a company’s total spending. In an increasingly challenging economic environment, boardroom discussions will be focused on increasing net profitability and reducing bottom line expenses. With employee-initiated expenses being considered as the second most controllable expense after personnel and benefits, expense automation is at the forefront of capital expenditure control.

Many companies are struggling with the issue of how to allocate and reconcile company credit card or procurement card statements. Most companies still process large numbers of expense reports manually, a labour intensive process, whether this is paper based or spreadsheet based. The process is a considerable strain of company resources and can cost between £30 to £80 per expense claim. External research has shown that expense automation systems can:

• Reduce the average time to enter expense claims by 60%
• Reduce the cost to process (CTP) an expense claim by more than 80%
• Reduce the time to settle an expense claim by 90%
• Reduce the cost for expense related goods & services by 10% by volume
purchasing and improved negotiation leverage

With inSight £xpense we take the frustration out of expense entry and replace this with an easy-to-use, intuitive, web based environment that gets immediate buy-in from your employee’s. Fresh and friendly screens give your employees instant access to their current, previous and approved expense claims at the click of a button. inSight £xpense is the first expense automation system (EA) to use graphical point-and-click expense entry. Now your users will be able to graphically view each expense item as this is added to their claim. 80% of the development time was put in to the design of the end-user environment, making this the easiest and cleanest system available to date. We all know each company’s requirements are different, which is why our expense solution is highly customisable. User screens will replicate your company’s requirements and not someone else’s! Built around our flagship e-procurement product, inSight £xpenses offers your company the best-of-breed software experience, built on the latest internet technologies.

Maintaining control over your employee expense claims is critical to expenditure control. inSight £xpense gives you full control over the items that each employee can claim, keeping that corporate control. With each claim type, you can specify the maximum cost values, allocate the account codes and analysis categories, dictate if the user can adjust the cost, attach comments and give a graphical representation of the claim item. By giving each expense item on the system complete customisation, no longer will you see coding errors or claim items that can not be processed as company expenditure. Your employees will be unaware of current VAT rules and vehicle banding, which is why inSight handles these complex discissions. Taking away the complexity allows the user to complete their claim with the least amount of time and effort.

All banking institutes now give their customers the ability to download their bank statement as an electronic document. This downloadable statement can be imported directly in to an employee’s expense claim, any non-business expenditure can be easily remove from the claim. Most companies today, issue corporate credit cards to their employees instead of using personal credit cards. The problem with this is the ability to get the users to justify their expense against the corporate statement, which is why inSight supports global statement processing.Using the global import facility, any member of the accounting department can import the company credit card statement into inSight. inSight will automatically generate an expense claim for each employee on the statement. Each employee will receive an email asking them to complete the expense claim, which will already have the transactions created. Any personal expenditure can then be added to the users re-payment balance and removed on their next claim.

The approval features of inSight give your employees and business managers a full audit history of each request they were involved in throughout the complete expense cycle. Approvers can easily track outstanding requests and review the other approver’s comments and the approval route that the request has taken.
Nominees are given access to approve or deny requests on your behalf, giving you the freedom to attend those important meetings knowing that your assistant can approve those critical requests that need immediate attention. But how do I notify the next approver why I approved the request? No need to punch-out to an external email application to send relating correspondence to the approval chain and give comments, this is all contained within the inSight environment.

With real-time budget control inSight makes sure each request is tagged with the latest budget, commitment, accrual and ledger information. Enhanced budget checking is standard, even different security groups can have different budget checking methods. These include year-to-date, cumulative-year-to-date, financial-month, forecast-budgeting, project-budgeting. Using the budget desginer, groups of codes can be budget checked even down to the supplier code or department.

With any solution you need to make sure the workflow engine can handle your current business process and have the flexibility to adapt to each scenario. Our workflow engine and the wrokflow designer work in real-time with the application and includes approval groups and dynamic approval chains. Not only can you have different rules for each module, but for each operating company.

One of the great things about inSight is that it comes with its own integrated reporting solution, no need for third-party add-ons. inSight provides you with two powerful reporting tools, the standard reporter and the ad hoc reporter. The standard reporting tool gives you the power to easily mine your procurement data and gives you the freedom to create your own custom reports. The second reporting tool provided is the ad-hoc reporter, which allows you to quickly mine data, then have it presented in a Microsoft Excel format, ready for that all-important budget meeting.

For any expense solution, integration can mean the success or failure of your project. How will the system integrate with your current financial system? Do we require any manual imports? Is the data validated? Is it real-time?

You could find yourself asking all these questions and finding that your chosen solution does not give you the real-time integration you require, unlike inSight! inSight has real-time integration for most mid-to-large Financial Platforms. All transaction data is fully validated before processed by our real-time integration gateway. As the transactions are posted real-time, this ensures that your budget figures and financial status are always accurate. The integration points can be fully configured to support your current posting processes, as some companies may not wish to create a transaction until the invoice is received. The power of the integration system can be quickly configured through the standard web-based administration system, no need for additional consultancy should you change your mind, take control, take ownership.

All aspects of the inSight configuration can be amended through the browser and the administration is separated into five distinct areas. This allows your high level administrators to assign sub-administrators to the various aspects of the system, giving your company greater flexibility of the administration of inSight. This role based administration gives the ability to designate areas of the system where departments may already be collecting that type of data. An example being the personnel department, this department will be processing starters and leavers, therefore they could control the user access to your procurement solution, keeping control of your buying guidelines.