Leveraging Employee Expense Data to Drive Sales Revenue: How the Integration of T&E and CRM Solutions Can Be Used to Improve Sales Team Efficiencies

AuthorTim Wheatcroft
Published date01 April 2018
Date01 April 2018
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1002/jcaf.22325
127
© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
DOI 10.1002/jcaf.22325
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Leveraging Employee Expense
Data to Drive Sales Revenue:
How the Integration of T&E and
CRM Solutions Can Be Used to
Improve Sales Team Efficiencies
Tim Wheatcroft
INTRODUCTION
Travel and enter-
tainment (T&E)
is often the largest
single controllable
cost for businesses,
and can reach 10% to
12% of all spend, sec-
ond only to payroll.
The conventional
wisdom for expense manage-
ment has been to focus on cost
control as the primary goal.
Creating travel policies that
minimize excessive spend, and
processing and enforcing these
through automated expense
management software, has
long been favored by finance
departments as the preferred
approach.
However, as corporate
travel expense management
programs have become more
efficient—both in terms of
their automation of manual
processes and their ability to
control employee spend—we
have reached a stage where
the improvements that can
be delivered are diminishing.
Automation has eliminated
much of the time required
to create and process paper-
based expense reports, which
can now be created with just
one or two clicks on a mobile
device. What was an activity
that could take sev-
eral hours at the end
of a business trip
can now be done
in just a handful of
seconds after each
transaction.
Automating
manual expense
submission and
approval processes
has reached a stage where few
efficiencies can be introduced
that will further reduce the
per-report processing cost. In
fact, it is already estimated
to cost 75% less to create,
submit, and process a report
using expense management
software than with the tra-
ditional receipt-and-spread-
sheet method. While AI and
machine learning can deliver
some further efficiencies in the
expense management process,
Travel and entertainment (T&E) is often the largest
single controllable cost for businesses, and can
reach 10% to 12% of all spend. New approaches
for integrating and visualizing T&E spend versus
revenue generated can allow organizations to
deploy travel budgets more effectively, in order to
drive increased revenues. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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