Solutions

Expense Management

Travel Booking Integration

Expense Management: Travel Booking Integration

A 360 Degree View

CyberShift has worked closely with our clients and has performed extensive market research to understand what capabilities are needed to maximize the value and benefit of integration between travel booking and expense management systems. Unlike other vendors that are focused on creating marketing hype, our aim is to deliver solutions to real-world client needs. Our research showed there is a strategic need to integrate travel booking and expense management, but only as long as it did not cause additional work or confusion for the traveler. Essentially, organizations need actionable data that can enable them to make better policy decisions, provide analysis on vendor negotiated rates and identify areas of nonconformance, while also streamlining the process from travel planning through expense reimbursement. Clients are looking for answers to the following questions:

• What was booked (travel booking) vs. what was actually spent (expense management)?
• Are employees following policies in place; are they using the online booking tool and our corporate Travel Management Company (TMC); are they upgrading after the fact; are the booked rates actually what was expensed?
• Are preferred vendors delivering on negotiated and booked rates?

The challenge is to bridge the information gap between the corporate travel booking and expense management solutions with little user impact.

Our Vision

CyberShift's vision reflects what we learned from our clients and the market. We provide an open platform so that organizations can use the booking tool or the Travel Management Company (TMC) of their choice with CyberShift's expense management product options. In that way companies can realize the benefits of an integrated solution without being forced to change from an already trusted supplier. For those organizations who may not have such relationships in place, CyberShift has partnered with a number of best-of-breed travel booking tools, and from a product capability viewpoint we are focused on providing meaningful and actionable data that our clients really want.

CyberShift's Solution

Our approach does not burden the traveler with additional reconciliation tasks, but moves these requirements to an automated back office function that delivers meaningful and actionable data to our clients without causing inconvenience to the end users. CyberShift offers a reporting and analysis solution that consolidates booked travel transaction data and actual business expense data from the CyberShift Expense™* product. Now, mid to large sized enterprises can strategically and proactively manage business expenses and business travel at the same time without adding extra work for the business traveler.

Booked travel transaction data is automatically matched with actual expense data based on a number of key parameters. This seamless integration of booking and expense data into one consolidated repository offers tremendous quantifiable benefits to organizations while not burdening the business traveler with additional reconciliation.

With the combined power of CyberShift Expense and travel data integration, administrators in accounts payable, finance, procurement, travel and other key departments can manage policies, amount and type of spend and leverage preferred providers while gaining deep insight into employee business expenses and spending patterns. Back-end data is populated from source systems and available for analysis on a regularly scheduled basis. This data reveals critical metrics that allow organizations visibility into their employees' business expenses so that they can take proactive steps to reduce overall spend through improved policy communication or shifting market share from one supplier to another. Key analysis and dashboards have been created to provide detailed information including: variance reports that identify booked expenses versus actual expenses; total spend booked but not expensed; total spend expensed but not booked, matched transactions and users adoption.

CyberShift's extensive expertise in the fields of Workforce Management and Expense Management allows us to offer advanced technology, multi-faceted functionality and flexible deployment options, including both license fee and On Demand (Software-as-a-Service) models to meet an organization's global business needs.

Contact us to learn how you can put The CyberShift Advantage to work for you!

*CyberShift Expense was previously known as Necho Expense.