Expense Management

9 Signs it’s Time to Switch Expense Management Systems

by Tim Wheatcroft

9 Signs it’s Time to Switch Expense Management Systems

It’s not too long ago that the panacea to everyone’s expense problems was “get expense management automation software.” Anything was a quantum leap from having to staple or tape your receipts to a spreadsheet, then hand it into your accounting team, and then wait a pay cycle (or two) for them to be reviewed, and then go up the approval chain, and then finally to the payroll team who would often cut you a paper check... that you often had to take to the bank or ATM to deposit.

How We Did It: Supporting Front Line Healthcare Workers During the COVID-19 Outbreak

How We Did It: Supporting Front Line Healthcare Workers During the COVID-19 Outbreak

A sudden transition to working from home meant that nonprofit Compass Health Network needed to rapidly bring its expense processing online. The organisation also needed to ensure that it could effectively support its front line employees, so they could focus on their core mission of supporting their clients.

Controlling Car Rental Spend With Car FOLIO

by Barbara Doane

Controlling Car Rental Spend With Car FOLIO

Many organisations have negotiated corporate rates with their preferred car rental providers. But with potentially many thousands of rentals each year, how can they verify that each traveller receives the appropriate rates? Chrome River is making it far easier to analyse the data with the launch of FOLIO for car rentals.

Empowering our Customers’ Administrators with Configuration Self-Service

by Ryan Plutnicki

Empowering our Customers’ Administrators with Configuration Self-Service

Chrome River is further empowering our customers with the introduction of configuration self-service, allowing administrators to quickly and easily make changes within their expense management solution.

Gartner Digital Markets Reviews Crown Chrome River the Leader in Expense Reporting

by Tim Wheatcroft

Gartner Digital Markets Reviews Crown Chrome River the Leader in Expense Reporting

Gartner Digital Markets uses real reviews from verified users to rate software products. So when its reports list us as the leading expense software solutions, we're pretty happy. See for yourself where we stacked up against three of our key competitors.

Tackling the Challenge of German Per Diems

by Barbara Doane

Tackling the Challenge of German Per Diems

German per diems may not suddenly spring to mind as a critical business issue for global organisations. However, if you work in the world of corporate travel, expense or accounting, it can be a major source of angst. Thankfully, help is at hand.

What Makes People Commit Expense Fraud?

by Tim Wheatcroft

What Makes People Commit Expense Fraud?

An estimated 5% of business travellers commit expense fraud. But what makes them do it? Is it just that the temptation is too much to resist, or that they bear a grudge against their company. Our survey revealed some interesting findings.

HBR Research: How to Use Data to Protect Your Corporate Travel Culture

by Tim Wheatcroft

HBR Research: How to Use Data to Protect Your Corporate Travel Culture

How can organisations protect their travel culture and insulate their budgets during times of economic uncertainly. Harvard Business Review analyzes industry data and talks to leading experts in the field to develop best practises that are a must-read for every finance or corporate travel leader.

10 Things to Look for on Your Expense Management Shortlist (And Why Chrome River Needs to Be on It)

by Barbara Doane

10 Things to Look for on Your Expense Management Shortlist (And Why Chrome River Needs to Be on It)

Your old expense processes simply don’t support your organisation’s existing needs, so you’ve decided that it’s time to search for a new expense management solution. Whether it’s finally moving from soul-crushing spreadsheets, or freeing your company from the shackles of a clunky old system, you need to be sure that the solution will support your organisation’s needs today and for years into the future. Here are 10 key reasons why Chrome River needs to be on your shortlist:

How I Did It: Eliminating the Risks of Paper-Intensive Expense Processes

How I Did It: Eliminating the Risks of Paper-Intensive Expense Processes

The University of New Mexico upgraded its expense claims to Chrome River in 2016. In this guest blog post, Lorrie Black, a senior business analyst at UNM, discusses how the university’s decision to move to Chrome River from a home-grown system reduced risk and increased employee satisfaction.

How I Did It: Reducing Administrative Time to Devote More Resources to Our Core Mission

How I Did It: Reducing Administrative Time to Devote More Resources to Our Core Mission

Northeast Treatment Centers is a Philadelphia-based non-profit which provides a continuum of trauma-informed behavioural health and social services designed to meet complex needs of all family members. In this guest blog post, NET’s Controller, Robert Ferrandino, and Accounts Payable Specialist, Teresamarie Morris, explain how Chrome River’s expense and invoice automation solutions let business flow by enabling the finance team to focus on high value activities.

How Manual Expense Reporting is Killing Your Finance Team’s Efficiency

by Tim Wheatcroft

How Manual Expense Reporting is Killing Your Finance Team’s Efficiency

Manually attaching receipts to spreadsheets is a real drudge for business travellers. However, their frustrations pale in comparison to those of the finance team, who have to navigate cumbersome approval workflows, enforce confusing T&E policies, and spend hours manually entering data into their accounting system.

What do Expense Professionals Expect to See in 2019 and Beyond?

by Barbara Doane

What do Expense Professionals Expect to See in 2019 and Beyond?

At Chrome River, we are interested in what’s next for the expense automation industry. To find out where our customers see the world of corporate expense management going, we asked them what their number one prediction is for expense management in 2019.

How I Did It: Building an Integrated Card and Expense Program

by Mary Hayat, Dealer Tire

How I Did It: Building an Integrated Card and Expense Program

Cleveland, Ohio-based Dealer Tire manages replacement tire and parts programs for more than 20 automotive OEMs in the U.S. and China. In this guest blog post, Mary Hayat, Dealer Tire’s director of accounting, explains how the company lets business flow by building an integrated card and expense program.

Is Your Travel Expense Policy Keeping Up With the Times?

by Tim Wheatcroft

Is Your Travel Expense Policy Keeping Up With the Times?

Your organisation must ensure that its travel and expense policy stays updated, to support the requirements of both the employer and also those who need to submit expense claims. With services such as Uber/Lyft and Airbnb now in the mainstream, is your policy keeping up?

How I Did It: Upgrading to Chrome River from Another Expense Solution

How I Did It: Upgrading to Chrome River from Another Expense Solution

Latham & Watkins was founded in 1934 and is one of the world’s largest and most prestigious law firms. It has annual revenues of more than $3 billion, and has 2,500 attorneys. In this guest post, Neil Ackley, Latham & Watkins’ director of global accounting explains how he let business flow for the firm by upgrading its expense management solution to Chrome River.

How I Did It: Five Key Steps to Manage Technology Change

by Karen Keegan, Nixon Peabody

How I Did It: Five Key Steps to Manage Technology Change

Nixon Peabody, LLP is a Global 100 law firm with more than 700 attorneys across the U.S., Europe and Asia. In this guest post, Karen Keegan, Nixon Peabody’s assistant controller, discusses how to the firm let business flow by effectively managing technology change.

Intelligent Automation with Chrome River Autobot: Eliminating Repetitive Tasks in Expense Approval

by Tim Wheatcroft

Intelligent Automation with Chrome River Autobot: Eliminating Repetitive Tasks in Expense Approval

Chrome River announces the launch of Autobot - an intelligent automation solution which enables organizations to create custom workflows that streamline repetitive manual tasks.

Chrome River Leads Global Expense Players in Building Stronger Customer Relationships

by Tim Wheatcroft

Chrome River Leads Global Expense Players in Building Stronger Customer Relationships

Product capabilities and functionality are almost top of any company’s list of priorities when assessing software solutions. However, any organisation that’s looking to deploy a software solution across the enterprise needs to understand that the relationship with the solution provider can be just as critical for long-term success as the product itself.

Why is Mobility the Foundation of Effective Expense Management in Construction?

by Stephen White

Why is Mobility the Foundation of Effective Expense Management in Construction?

The construction industry is more exposed to economic ebbs and flows than almost any other sector of the economy. As a result of this position, construction companies must ensure that they carefully maintain cash flow and cost control, even during boom periods. How can employee expense automation solutions help this?

How Expense Automation Can Increase Manufacturers’ Profit Margins

by Stephen White

How Expense Automation Can Increase Manufacturers’ Profit Margins

Any opportunity for manufacturers to lower manufacturers' operating expenses is welcomed by the CFO, whether this is hedging against commodity price increases and exchange rate fluctuations, or identifying opportunities for cost reductions within the supply chain. But what about reducing the cost of back-office processes?

Capturing and Optimising Your True Corporate Travel Program Spend Using Total Cost of Ownership

by Ted Stavropoulos

Capturing and Optimising Your True Corporate Travel Program Spend Using Total Cost of Ownership

If your CFO or controller asked you to provide the organisation’s total travel spend over the past year, how would you get that data? The obvious (and traditional) answer is to ask for reports from your travel agency, breaking down hotel, flight and rental car costs. That should give you a pretty accurate figure, right? Well – not really.

Specialist Expense Vendors vs. ERP Suite Modules: Pros and Cons

by Jim Whitmore

Specialist Expense Vendors vs. ERP Suite Modules: Pros and Cons

For mid-size and large companies, best-of-breed travel and expense or all-in-on isn’t the only decision to be made when it comes to expense software. Many ERP providers also offer expense management capabilities as part of their broader suite of financial and HR tools. How do you decide which works best for you?

Alternative Facts and The Fallacy of Offline Expense Management

by Mandy Neske

Alternative Facts and The Fallacy of Offline Expense Management

There has been a lot of discussion in the business software market about the benefits of browser-based, responsive web (RWD) apps versus native Android and iOS apps. Even though there is evidence showing that more and more organisations are moving toward RWD for mobile software deployment, the debate continues as to which is better, just like Mac vs. Windows, Peyton vs. Tom and Pepsi vs. Coke.

Which Way Does Your Non-Profit Handle Non-Employee Expenses?

by Ali Mast

Which Way Does Your Non-Profit Handle Non-Employee Expenses?

Volunteers can offer an incredibly valuable resource for non-profit and non-governmental organisations, and other non-employees, such as scholarship and grant recipients, are a key part of many of these organisations. However, properly tracking and recording any out-of-pocket expenses they incur can be a major headache. Organisations typically have two options for handling expenses accrued by volunteers and non-employees. One involves a time-consuming, tedious process, while the other offers a quick and easy resolution.

Top 10 Perils of Using a Manual Expense Solution

Top 10 Perils of Using a Manual Expense Solution

Nearly half of all organisations are still stuck using manual expense claiming systems. If you continue to use paper-based processes instead of an expense automation solution, the risks could easily outweigh any perceived benefits.

How to Make the Business Case for an Expense Management System

How to Make the Business Case for an Expense Management System

Fifty-four percent of respondents to the recent GBTA / American Express Traveller Sentiment Survey said that they submit their expenses electronically. While the adoption of expense claim automation solutions is at a record level, it still highlights that nearly half of all business travellers are forced to stuff their pockets, wallets and briefcases with receipts, which they then have to staple to sheets of paper and mail to accounting departments, along with a printed spreadsheet that needs to be typed up with every detail of every item.

Chrome River and Sabre: Making Integrated Travel and Expense Even Smoother

by Alan Rich

Chrome River and Sabre: Making Integrated Travel and Expense Even Smoother

As you may have noticed from today’s announcement made at the GBTA national conference, we are proud to become a Premier Provider of expense management for Sabre, one of the world’s biggest travel technology providers. This comes just a couple of weeks after we announced Sabre as the latest travel industry leader to adopt our expense management solution for its own 10,000 global employees.

Chrome River and Traxo Means Even Easier Hotel Expenses

by Alan Rich

Chrome River and Traxo Means Even Easier Hotel Expenses

As you may have seen from today’s press release, we’ve just announced an exciting new relationship with Traxo for hotel receipt integration. This will give Chrome River EXPENSE users an even better (and easier) experience when preparing their expense claims, and we’re sure it will be very well received by anyone who’s ever had to manually import or allocate hotel receipt data into their expense claim.

5 Things to Consider When Choosing a Global Expense Management Solution

by Craig Weiner

5 Things to Consider When Choosing a Global Expense Management Solution

If you are a global organisation looking to upgrade your expense management solution, there is a dizzying array of offerings on the market. Many of the vendors you speak to will tell you that they offer a global solution. However, there’s being able to process the occasional foreign hotel and restaurant bill, and then there’s a true global solution that will work for thousands of end users across dozens of different countries, supporting complex workflows, tax requirements and regional standards.

6 Questions Expense Management Vendors Don’t Want You to Ask

by Brian Deleon

6 Questions Expense Management Vendors Don’t Want You to Ask

When you’re looking at new expense management software, or looking to replace your existing system, every vendor will be more than happy to highlight the key selling points of their solution. “Look at this feature!” “See how we can make your life easier.” While shiny features are certainly great, they don’t always tell the full story, and sometimes you should be more focused on what the sales people don’t say. If you want to get the skinny on which solution will best match your organisation’s needs, you need to delve a little deeper and get beyond the sales pitch.

Welcoming MERCURY

by Alan Rich

Welcoming MERCURY

Those of you with a keen knowledge of Roman mythology will know Mercury was the god of financial gain, and travellers (among other things). This is really quite fitting given that today we unveil Chrome River MERCURY, which delivers a completely new experience in corporate expense management, making your travel smoother, and speeding up your expense processing.

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Our choice of Chrome River EXPENSE was made in part due to the very user-friendly interface, easy configurability, and the clear commitment to impactful customer service – all aspects in which Chrome River was the clear winner. While Chrome River is not as large as some of the other vendors we considered, we found that to be a benefit and our due diligence showed that it could support us as well as any large players in the space, along with a personalized level of customer care. Sally Abella, Director of Corporate Travel Harman International
We are excited to be able to enforce much more stringent compliance to our expense guidelines and significantly enhance our expense reporting and analytics. By automating these processes, we will be able to free up AP time formerly spent on manual administrative tasks, and enhance the role by being much more strategic. Ben Zastrow Zelle