Product Update: 24-Hour Support is Coming!

With many organizations today, the 9-to-5 job is no longer the norm, which means that there’s always a chance that you might need support after normal business hours. Here at Certify, we asked: why wait until the next business day for help when you can get it right when you need it?

When you need someone to help guide you through a process or an unexpected issue, you want someone who is available on your schedule. Certify has heard you and we’re stepping up to the plate! Starting May 18th, 2015, Certify will be offering 24-hour support, Monday through Friday.

That’s right – you can call at any time, day or night, 5 days a week, and speak to a knowledgeable, experienced Support Expert whose number one goal is delivering customer happiness to you. After all, customer happiness is our number one priority, and what better way to show we care than to have a real person available 24 hours a day to help you?

U.S.-based, real people, answering your call, who really know how to use Certify. Whether it's a basic question or an in-depth process discussion, our Support Experts have the skills and experience to help you succeed with Certify. Any company can say that they care about you and your business, but we make sure our actions speak louder than our words by providing you with the help you need, when you need it. Of course, you can always access our continually expanding Knowledge Base at anytime by clicking “Support” on your account homepage. Once there, you can quickly and easily find Support documents spanning a whole range of topics.

Certify continues to make travel and expense easy for you, and we are always working on ways to improve your customer happiness. From mobile device expense report creation and submission, to quick and easy reimbursements, we make sure the expense reporting process is simple and straightforward for everyone at your organization.

Expense Software and Expense Policy Enforcement

One of the most important components of an organization's travel and expense management is the travel and expense policy. Whether in a rudimentary form that only gives a few guidelines or in an advanced form that governs every aspect of management, it is necessary to have an expense policy. There are multiple uses of one:

Standardize the reporting and reimbursement processes Prevent expense management fraud Control spend

Detailing a sound travel and expense policy only makes up half the job; enforcing it is strictly is just as important. In this article, we'll discuss a few aspects of expense policy and how online expense tracking software helps with its enforcement.

Instead of waiting till the employee submits an expense report is submitted after a trip, it is a good practice to require pre-approvals as part of the policy. Granted, the employee will not be able to give an exact accounting of the expenses incurred, but there could at least be a tentative report that gives an idea of the kind of expenses that the employee is liable to incur and the amount of spend.

If the organization uses expense software, pre-approvals can be simplified and can be edited to be used as the basis for the final expense reports that will be prepared and submitted after the trip.

As mentioned earlier, enforcement of policy cannot be done without the adequate number of checks and balances. There has to be a mechanism to weed out out-of-policy expense reports. It is up to the organization to have a single or a double verification phase where the different expense items are verified and the accompanying receipts are audited. This is a very important step in preventing fraud. It is advisable that the organization verifies every expense report instead of randomly sampling a few to ensure that there is no scope for fraud. It is also advisable to detail the kind of penalty the employee has to pay for stepping out of bounds of the policy or the employees won't take it seriously.

With online expense software, organizations can include adequate checks and balances. Line item verification and receipt audit can be automated to reduce the burden on the supervisor. As the software does the work, all the reports can be verified instead of a few random ones.

A chaotic and complex workflow probably does as much, if not more, damage as not having a well-defined workflow. Without standardization, the routing becomes chaotic and employees will not be sure about their roles. There will be scope for bottlenecks and obstacles in the process. With expense tracking software, standardizing and streamlining the expense management process is a breeze. It allows for the implementation of a well-defined workflow. Every individual stakeholder's role and responsibility is defined to ensure that there is no confusion or ambiguity.

Expense Reimbursement Software Know More About It

Expense reimbursement software helps organizations manage their end to end expense management processes in a more systematic and streamlined manner when compared to the traditional manual processes. It comes with a bunch of features that cater to all the expense management related activities. The usual details about the features and benefits are there for everyone to see; in this article, we'll take a look at those things that are missed sometimes, either because you fail to ask or because the vendor fails to mention.

Integrates with other solutions - Today, many of the expense software solutions available in the market are built on open platform architecture. The advantage that organizations can gain from this is that these solutions can integrate with other applications and provide an exchange of data that is seamless. This means that if you have different applications that need the same information, you don't have to worry about manually duplicating the information anymore. This saves a lot of time for all those involved.

Analytics - Most people think about the expense management capabilities and features of the solution but forget to enquire about a feature that will help them very much in making their expense management process efficient save them money in the long run. The analytics feature helps organizations crunch complex numbers and process all the data they have. After all, where can we learn from, if not from the past?

This data always existed. What you get with an expense software solution are the tools to process this data and make sense from it. The processed information can be shared with the relevant employees to enable better and more accurate decision making.

Online and Mobile - The trend nowadays is to shift to the cloud. Most vendors who offer an on-premise solution also offer an on-demand or Software as a Service solution. Online expense software is more beneficial because it allows users to be mobile and complete their activities from anywhere. It also does not have to be installed on a system, freeing up essential space for other data. Everything will be stored on the cloud securely and can be called in a matter of seconds.

Policy enforcement - Policy enforcement is a major challenge and a big headache for many organizations around the world. They come up with beautifully defined policies but fail in enforcing them on the ground. However much airtight the policy is there are always employees who go out of policy. Expense reimbursement software lets you enforce the policy by controlling the kind of reports and expenses your employees can submit.

The line items, formats, and workflows are flexible enough that even a strict policy can be easily enforced. There is simply no scope for going out of policy because the users will not be able to prepare any out of policy expense reports.

How to reduce extreme T&E Spend

We can’t deny the fact that every business have their own way how to manage the expenses that they have. For some of the big companies extreme travel and entertainment (T&E) spend can cause substantial costs in the firm. Regardless in the size of the company every organization must aware and take precautions to reduce extreme and fraudulent spending.

Is it true that you are using electronic, automated software to report and oversee T&E spending? Do you have a T&E arrangement set up? Assuming this is the case, is your T&E strategy naturally upheld?

It's almost difficult to completely manage potential extortion when physically overseeing T&E spend (for instance, with spreadsheets and paper expense reports). Various control focuses, complex support courses of action and manual reviewing techniques all add to the absence of understanding into exorbitant spending.

An automated expense management framework streamlines the reporting and approbation process. Furthermore, frameworks that use portable innovation not just abatement the expense of expense report preparing; however they can enhance general approach agree-ability. Automated arrangements require quick documentation of costs of doing business, which are then immediately contrasted and the T&E strategy. The expense report is sifted through precisely characterized guidelines, and ordered for investigation with the snap of a catch. Administrators and officials can undoubtedly distinguish anomalies and representatives that disregard organization arrangement.

On the off chance that an association does not have the assets to productively audit every expense, the survey methodology can either get to be prolonged or disregarded. Intemperate or out-of-arrangement spending, for example, insufficiently itemized expense reports can happen when workers are unconscious of strategies. Utilizing innovation to both distinguish deceitful movement and hinder it from happening will fix your organization's control on T&E spends. Online, automated software permits organizations to actualize strategy controls, which instantly distinguish infringement and inform the important gatherings. This component of responsibility streamlines the audit methodology and definitely diminishes unnecessary (and possibly fake) spends.