Why should we introduce an automated expense management system?

Expenseflo

We all know that Expense Management Systems do a great job of letting your travelling employees file their expenses quickly and efficiently. However, gaining complete control over your organisation’s travel expenses requires two additional crucial tasks that an Expense Management System (EMS) cannot handle:

1. Auditing paper expense receipts for expense claim accuracy and travel policy compliance
2. Analysing those same receipts to maximise VAT recovery

By taking those two additional steps, which is what Meridian’s Expenseflo UNIQUELY does, you can save up to another 6 per cent on your total travel bill.

It is estimated that well under half of corporations have an automated expense management system. If you are not one of the converted yet, here’s why you should have one:

Reduces travel costs

• Provides management information for supplier negotiation
• Boosts traveller compliance with preferred suppliers, via pre-trip approval

Reduces process costs

• Eliminates many manual, paper-based tasks, reducing processing costs by up to 80%
• Reduces employee and management time
• Radically reduces time taken for business travellers to complete expense claims and receive reimbursement
• Easy, one-click approval for line managers

Our expense management system, Expenseflo EMS, is the best on the market. However, we recognise many companies already have an expense management system and don’t want to change.

That’s not a problem. We can plug any expense management system (or more than one) of your choice into Expenseflo EXPENSE AUDIT and Expenseflo VAT RECOVERY so you can get the full benefit of complete expense management.

Should you wish to discuss Expenseflo service please contact:

  Adam Smith
  e-mail: adam.smith@meridianglobalservices.com
  phone: +44.208.601.4600

One expense claim in eight is wrong

Expenseflo

Our Expenseflo EXPENSE AUDIT experts can check every one of your business travellers’ expense receipts against their expense claims for accuracy and policy compliance.
We find that on average one expense claim in eight needs amending. Some errors are accidental, some deliberate. Either way, they cost your company big money.

Huge savings
The results speak for themselves. When one major European manufacturer signed up for Expenseflo EXPENSE AUDIT, our team found €3.5 million of savings in €63 million of submitted expenses.

Why not?
Each year, approximately 15,000 companies worldwide send Meridian their travellers’ receipts to recover the VAT on them. Since we are looking at all that paper for you anyway, why not let Expenseflo audit those same receipts for accuracy and policy compliance?

World-leading VAT recovery process

Expenseflo

The final stage of the Expenseflo complete travel management system is Meridian’s world-leading VAT recovery process. We help you maximise your local and foreign VAT claims.

In case you aren’t familiar with VAT recovery, here’s a quick summary:

Why recover VAT?
That’s a simple one. It is estimated that companies could reduce their travel budgets by 4 per cent if they recovered all applicable VAT.

What we do
Our experts check every receipt to identify all incurred local and foreign VAT.
Local VAT is reported back to the client and uploaded directly to the client’s ERP or other financial accounting package.

Foreign VAT is claimed from the relevant foreign authorities on behalf of the client and handled from submission to refund.

However, it is not as easy as it sounds. That’s why the European Commission reckons more than half of all major corporations fail to recover VAT incurred on foreign trips – and the figure for smaller businesses is even higher. It’s estimated that €5 billion of potential refunds go unrecovered in the EU alone each year.
The reason many companies fail to recover their VAT is that it is time-consuming, highly technical and very easy to get wrong. VAT claims have to be presented to each country’s tax authorities in completely different ways with all original receipts present and correct. Each country also has different rules about what VAT is recoverable, with plenty of details to trip you up, like whether a meal was for clients or for colleagues only.