The client, a Private Equity firm, wanted the TresVista team to manage the T&E expenses management process and associated tasks along with supporting them in clearing the employees’ historic unsubmitted expenses for one of their divisions, that included eight subsidiaries with employees across several locations, as this was flagged as a risk area by the auditors.
To audit and approve Travel & Entertainment (T&E) expenses in ‘Concur‘ (Expense Management Tool) incurred for business purposes by employees in accordance with client’s T&E guidelines.
The TresVista Team followed the following process:
• Conducted a detailed analysis for expenses that are pending submission by employees
• Followed up and reminded employees to submit their expenses which were pending for more than 45 days in an employee account
• Provided detailed explanation for any rejected expense in their account including steps they needed to follow to avoid rejection of the expenses
The major hurdles faced by the TresVista Team were:
• Managing the AP queue
• Unsubmitted expense reports which included expenses aging over 45 days
• The Concur tool did not automatically sync with the HR report. This meant that any changes to the employment status of an employee were out of date with respect to the HR report. As a result, many of their expense reports were booked incorrectly to the wrong cost centers causing delays or rejection at the manager approval stage
• Inadequate Reports: The Concur reports did not include sufficient data points to analyze the aging expenses (employee id, approval manager, transaction id, aging breaks, etc.)
The team overcame these hurdles by coordinating with Concur support to streamline reports and eliminated the effort to compile and organize data from multiple systems. The team also leveraged power query to automate the expense aging analysis from Concur reports and provided white glove service to the employees in tidying up their expense queue. The team further developed VBA macros to create templated emails eliminating recurring manual effort to draft follow-up emails, created comprehensive guide on hotel itemization, addressed employee queries, disputes, flagged special cases for exception approvals, cleared pending reports for terminated employees. Finally, the team presented a gap analysis of the existing T&E policy to the client, resulting in rollout of an updated policy to ensure uniform limits for expense categories and eliminated ambiguity on the guidelines.
The TresVista team coordinated with Concur support to streamline the reports and therefore eliminated the effort to compile and organize data from multiple systems.
