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3–17 Transmit Expense Reports by E-Mail
send them out to the violating employees and their supervisors. An additional
problem is that corporate travel policies change with some regularity, which
makes it difficult for the accounts payable staff to even know which policies are
still valid. A further problem arises when a company reimburses its employees
based on the per diem rates listed in the Federal Travel Regulation. This docu-
ment is used by the federal government to determine a reasonable cost of living at
each of over 100 cities throughout the country; given the frequency of change in
these numbers (at least quarterly), it becomes very labor-intensive to determine
which payments to make to employees. However, these problems can be elimi-
nated by converting the travel policies into rules that can be used by a computer
to automatically spot problems with expense reports that have been submitted
through an automated expense reporting system.
For example, input from a corporate travel card into an automated expense
reporting system can tell if an airfare is for a first-class seat, which may be pro-
hibited by company travel policy. If the first-class purchase can be set up as a
flagged field, then the computer system can automatically spot this issue and
either note it on a report or (more proactively) send an e-mail to the appropriate
person, who makes note of the issue. Examples of other rule violations are to ver-
ify that the correct airline was used (since there may be a bulk-purchase agree-
ment in place) and that restaurant bills were actually incurred during the period
spanned by a business trip (rather than before or after, which would be suspi-
cious). However, this sort of early-warning system can be quite expensive to cre-
ate. There are no standard software packages that perform this task, so the pro-
gramming staff must be called on to convert policies into rules that can be
understood by the computer system, and then set up an interface between the
rules database and the expense report database that will spot rule violations. In
short, this can be an expensive option to install, and so should only be considered
if there is a clear likelihood that there will be significant resulting cost savings.

Cost: Installation time:

3–17 TRANSMIT EXPENSE REPORTS BY E-MAIL
In an earlier section in this chapter, ‘‘Automate Expense Reporting,” there was a
discussion of how a company can install an automated system to walk users
through the process of submitting an expense report. Though it is so automated
that there is only a minimal need for any human intervention, it is also a system
that is usually created with custom programming. This is very expensive and
probably not worth the effort for companies without a sufficient volume of
expense reporting. This section describes a ‘‘poor man’s automated expense
report” for those companies that cannot afford a more sophisticated system.
The ‘‘poor man’s approach” involves using the existing e-mail system to
transmit expense reports to the accounts payable department. This approach does