Employee expenses, especially those that include travel, add up to a significant proportion of an organisations controllable expense. A lack of visibility and control in this area creates serious implications, not only through potential over payment but fraud. Add to this the high cost of back-office resources to process expense claims and it is easy to understand why travel and expense processing is such an expensive and inefficient part of an organizations financial operations.

Many solutions encourage organisations to re-engineer their entire expenses process which requires a large investment in ERP style technology. In reality, it is simply the back-office process that needs to be automated.

inSTREAM™ for Travel & Expenses is the easiest way to streamline and automate the travel and expenses process. By providing complete visibility, control and compliance throughout, we enable you realise significant efficiencies and immediate value by:
Automating tasks and decision makingAccelerating process performanceEliminating errors and omissionsMinimising the need for human intervention.

How it works

With inSTREAM™ there is no need to change the way your employees complete their expense claim forms. They simply complete them as normal and submit these by post, by email (as an attachment), by fax or they can scan and upload them via their web browser. Whatever media they choose, whatever format they prefer, their travel and expense claim is received byinSTREAM™, automatically receipted and a response issued confirming receipt and estimated processing time.

Automated Key Data Extraction

It is essential that employees are entitled to the expenses for which they make a claim. To confirm this, the detail of each expense must be extracted from its original document and made available in a structured format. inSTREAM™ identifies and extracts key data minimising the need for human intervention in this critical part of the process. Operators are on hand to assist with resolution handling and where checks and measures cannot prove the validity of each claim within defined confidence levels.

Data Validation

You can choose how you want your expense claims validated. With the key data extracted from each expense claim document, it can be easily matched against other sources of information including receipts or known sources such as finance or 3rd party systems. A score based on the confidence level will determine if the claim requires further investigation by an operator. However, this operator intervention can be completed online by any operator using inSTREAM™ Client software regardless of geographical location.

Decision Making

If approvals are required as part of the process then key data and supporting information can be automatically sent to decision makers by their preferred media such as email, mobile, web or even within your current ERP system. Regardless of their location and whatever their preference, they have the option to Approve, Decline or refer their decision quickly. Following your business rules, multiple approvals may be required but if timing is an issue, inSTREAM™ will retrieve an approval request from an absent employee after any period of inactivity and resubmit it to an alternative decision maker to avoid process delays.

Data Delivery

With inSTREAM™, it is easy to ensure that employee claims are reimbursed quickly, but it is also important to update both financial and HR systems with a record of each claim. inSTREAM™ enables completed data, original scanned documents and audit trails to be sent to one or multiple systems where the data is required.

Digital Records Storage

Every travel and expense claim and receipt, along with a complete audit trail can be automatically stored ‘online’ as part of the process within inSTREAM™ . These documents and data can be accessed from with your ERP system or by authorised users with a web browser. They are available for as long as your business rules define and can be retrieved by word or phrase just as easily as if were search ‘Google’.
Furthermore, many customers have approval from HMRC to destroy their paper records as all this data is stored in a compliant and easily retrievable solution.