Managing Travel Expenses Even the Vice President

If you think your business is facing extreme travel expense management challenges, then just be happy that none of your employees are vice president of the United States. It recently came to light that the man who does hold that office, Joe Biden, has been spending more than a pretty penny on his business travel ventures. According to CNN, Biden went to Europe on a brief trip, and his expenses were exorbitant. The bills included a whopping $585,000 for a one-night stay in Paris, $321,665 for a limousine company and $459,338.65 for a separate hotel booking in London. Biden himself was only in each town for one night, but he had a massive advance team traveling with him, renting 136 rooms for multiple evenings on the London leg of the tour. A spokesman for the State Department told CNN that these expenses were "nothing out of the ordinary" for a sitting vice president.

"They are in line with high-level travel across multiple administrations. The contract costs cover the entire range of support, including accommodations for military, communications, secret service staff and other support professionals," the department said in a statement.

All of this goes to show that everyone, whether a small business owner or the second most powerful man in America, is prone to making some questionable financial decisions sometimes. By using expense reporting software, everyone can keep better tabs on his or her expenditures, possibly preventing such incidents of overspending in the future.

Asking more about the Sunshine Act

Even though it is just implemented in the past years some of the people are having the hard time when it comes to the Sunshine Act. The Physician Payments Sunshine Act deadline is fast approaching. The new law has already taken effect, so hopefully you’ve already heard of it and taken steps to prepare. If not, you need to review the reporting requirements as soon as possible, and prepare what may be a lot of detailed information in just a few days.

For those who may be new to the medical industry, or for those who need a quick recap, we’ve compiled a list of the most frequently asked questions related to Sunshine Act reporting below.

Question #1:Who needs to comply with the Sunshine Act? Drug manufacturers, medical device manufacturers, and medical supply manufacturers operating in the US must report all monetary and/or value information transactions made to physicians and/or teaching hospitals.

Question #2: What must be reported? Items that must be reported include: any payments or value transfers of $10 or more made to physicians and/or teaching hospitals. Third party payments or transfers (i.e., payments or transfers made by a third party on behalf of a physician), or entity transfers (i.e., payments or transfers made to an organization with instructions to provide those payments or transfers to a specific physician or group of physicians) must also be reported.

Question #3: What are the penalties for failing to comply with the reporting requirement? Fines for noncompliance range from $1,000 to $10,000 for each unreported item, with a maximum penalty of $1,000,000 per organization.

Question #4: What are the key dates you need to know? August 1, 2013 – Manufacturers and GPOs must begin collecting data December 31, 2013 – The last day of data collection for the 2013 report March 31, 2014 – 2013 report deadline May 15, 2014 – Last day for physicians to review and dispute reported 2013 data before information is made public September 30, 2014 – First day 2013 data is posted to a public website

Question #5: What does each entry need to include? Each entry should include the physician/hospital name, NPI, primary specialty code, practice name, and practice address. The product name, details about the product, the nature of the benefit, and the amount of the expense must also be included.

Paperless Reporting Certify makes it Possible For your Firm

When you are working in a company and over the past years most of the offices are stepping into becoming a paperless office. Employees all the time are sitting in front of their computer and doing the documents for days just to finished it for any purposes such as email it. Somehow today most of the companies are not feeling to have a printer in their offices because they want to be aware in the environment and more convenient maybe doing one of the department digitalize is just effective.

The expense reporting process doesn't have to require this much effort and input. You can go paperless with your expense reports the same way you have with most of your other inter-office communications, saving your team from having to reconcile and investigate costs by hand. Better yet, you can make your expense reporting process automated. With the management software offered by Certify, it's possible for employees to complete all the data entry necessary for logging expenditures in moments.

Having to keep records and file boxes full of torn or otherwise illegible paper receipts is a thing of the past. With Certify's automated expense report software, you can keep each pertinent document stored safely online. No receipt or note will ever go missing, and no cost will ever be in dispute again. Our program will save all the data and flag all the questionable expenses immediately, as soon as they're entered into the system.

There's another great benefit to automated expense report technology - it backs up all of your data and receipt images, ensuring that your company's financial records are protected against threats both physical and digital. Certify backs up everything related to each expense reported within your company, and our database will house this information for as long as you use our products.

Business Travel Make it Easy

Most of the businesses today make travel as the part and it plays a big part in the any kind of business firm. In the past it is known that business travel is a part of the business plans of the any kind of business firm but somehow later on it causes a hard time for the business firms especially in handling the expense that they have in the company. Business travels are consider have a big expenses especially if it is taken occasionally by the employee imagine all of your expenses while you are in the trip are in the shoulder of the company from the airplane fare, hotel accommodation, foods and other expenses. But somehow every business company has their own policy on how to manage the expenses that they have after the trip but most of the employee are having the hard time with managing the papers that they have.

Since most of the employee are nagging with this all the time with the reports that they are business firms find a way somehow to make business travel even more easier. Today a lot of business company are making a big leap in using the technology and this is how the Certify comes into the place in having with the problem with the reports.

Your end-to-end travel booking solution built to simplify corporate travel for both the employee and the manager while providing low rates on airfare, hotels and rental vehicles.

Pre-trip notifications

View seating before booking

Enforce policy with travel restrictions

Integrated expense reporting solution

Apply unused ticket price to future bookings