TRENDING: How Spend Management Keeps The Show Going On

Whether making travel purchases, buying specialized equipment or even just picking up muffins for the morning meeting, employees often have problems getting out-of-pocket purchases cleared. The back-and-forth reimbursement process that companies typically use is a headache for both employers and employees, and often winds up wasting both money and time.

Not only can it impact employees’ personal finances, but the speed of delivery as well. According to recently released research, 57 percent of fleet workers had trouble paying work-related expenses on the road. These issues are pushing companies to explore solutions, like virtual cards and blockchain, to help fill the gaps that make the corporate spending process so slow.

In the October Workforce Spend Management Tracker, PYMNTS looks at the way companies are using new solutions and technologies to give money and time back to everyone.

What’s Happening In Workforce Spend

Companies are starting to build platforms and integrate tools with other services to expedite the expense process. These needs are filled by companies like mobile travel-and-expense (T&E) reporting solutions provider Rydoo, which recently integrated the Uber for Business platform into its expense management service.

Teampay, meanwhile, recently unveiled a suite of new features aiming to allow companies to view and monitor employee spend from a single platform. Others, like AppZen, are still exploring the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for features like real-time audits.

Elsewhere in the space, some are turning to companies like Airbnb for business travel needs, with the homeshare marketplace reporting that approximately 700,000 companies have signed onto its Airbnb for Work service. This service provides companies with a more holistic way of managing employee travel through a dashboard. The company has nearly doubled the number of bookings seen on its platform since April 2017, Airbnb said.

How Workforce Tools Help The Show Go On

Easy-to-use expense management tools are imperative for production companies in the entertainment industry. Adhering to tight schedules and deadlines means there’s little scope and time to edit out expense mistakes and delays in reimbursements.

For this month’s feature story, PYMNTS spoke with Torrey Tayenaka, co-founder and CEO of video production and marketing company Sparkhouse, to learn more about how the company uses corporate cards and reconciliation services to make sure everything stays on schedule.

“Deadlines are a huge issue in video production,” he said. “If we had one person making purchases, it would slow us down and make for a clunky process.”

Read the full story by downloading the Workforce Spend Management Tracker.

About The 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 with deeper insight into how funds are being spent.