How Spend Management Delivers The Right Meds To Relief Orgs

Field-based spending requires keeping careful tabs on how the money is spent to assure that all transactions are appropriate and compliant with a company’s policy. Too often, however, the reconciliation becomes an afterthought in the spend management process, and can be even more difficult for a company’s accounting department to address if paper receipts get lost.

Those headaches could become a thing of the past, as new solutions integrate spend management solutions directly into company operations. The new Workforce Spend Management Tracker highlights how these spend management integrations are reducing dependency on paper receipts, and keeping administrators clued in on workers’ field-based purchases, while empowering disaster workers to focus on relief rather than reconciliation.

The Latest Workforce Spend Management News

When employees hit the road for work, it can be difficult to assess how work-related funds are spent. That’s a problem that several players in the space are seeking to resolve.

Travel and expense (T&E) management solutions provider SalesTrip, for one, recently integrated its solution with customer relationship management (CRM) platform Salesforce to get insights into the cost-effectiveness of employee spending. With the integration in place, according to SalesTrip, managers will be able to better understand how much employees spend in the field, and compare the figures to the revenue that a business trip ultimately generates.

SalesTrip is not the only company looking to offer a new solution aimed at improving travel insights. A pair of T&E solution providers, Direct Travel and Serko, recently announced plans to build upon their existing agreement. Under the terms of the new collaboration, Serko’s Zeno T&E management solution would become available to Direct Travel’s North American small business clients. The Zeno solution provides customers with access to actionable insights, and category managers that can be used to aid decision-makers in making more informed travel-related booking decisions.

In other expense management news, payment solutions provider Prepaid Technologies recently acquired the dash purchasing card portfolio from Karmic Labs. With access to the dash brand, Prepaid’s solutions now include a purchasing card portfolio, expense management solution and other assets. These solutions have been added to the company’s existing solutions, which include payroll programs, business purchasing cards, rewards, incentives and per diem card portfolio offerings.

Deep Dive: Teaching Spend Management in Charter Schools

Flexible payment cards could also be put to use in public charter schools. These institutions, while largely independently operated, are still funded by taxpayer funds and are, therefore, subject to review by taxpayers, education officials and public watchdogs, among others.

This month’s Tracker features a Deep Dive that explores how flexible payment cards could help charter school professionals focus on education instead of procurement.

For Disaster Relief, Workforce Spend Tools Deliver the Right Medicine

It’s not just charter schools that need to be transparent in their spending. Nonprofit humanitarian groups that respond to natural or man-made disasters are expected to demonstrate that funds are spent appropriately on resources like food, clean water and medicine.

In the April feature story, Kate Dischino, VP of emergency programs for Americares, explained how the organization’s workforce spend management tools are professionalizing the nonprofit space, and helping workers focus on relief rather than financial reconciliation.

About the Workforce Spend Management Tracker

The Workforce Spend Management Tracker, powered by PEX, is a monthly report that examines how corporate spend solutions work to empower businesses with mobile workforces to make field-based purchases and deeper insight into how funds are being spent.