Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

3–20. Link Corporate Travel Policies to an Automated Expense Reporting System

The typical set of travel policies used by a company is quite detailed—thou shalt not charge to the company the cost of movies, clothing, first-class upgrades, and so on. However, the overburdened accounts payable staff has little time to review expense reports for these items, much less to then create variance reports and 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 document 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 eliminated 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 prohibited by company travel ...