Complete Expense Management

Complete Expense Management

Welcome to complete
expense management
We all know that Expense Management Applications do a
great job of letting your traveling employees file their expenses
quickly and efficiently. However, gaining complete control over
your organization’s travel expenses requires two additional
crucial tasks that an Expense Management Application (EMA)
cannot handle:
1. Auditing paper expense receipts for expense claim accuracy
and travel policy compliance
2. Analyzing those same receipts to maximize VAT recovery for
corporate travel
By taking those two additional steps, which is what Meridian’s
Expenseflo uniquely does, you can save up to 6% on your
company’s T&E spend.
So instead of looking like this:
Expense
management
application
Complete expense management that truly maximizes your
savings looks like this:
Expense
management
application –
Expenseflo EMA
(or 3rd party
provider)
Expense receipts
auditing –
Expenseflo
EXPENSE AUDIT
VAT recovery –
Expenseflo
VAT RECOVERY
Welcome to Expenseflo – Complete Expense Management.
Making paper work
Expenseflo turns a bureaucratic nightmare into a dream solution.
Paper expense invoices are a nuisance for every organization,
but you cannot get rid of them since many national tax
authorities still insist on seeing them.
Expenseflo makes that paper work. We take all the invoices
off your hands, we can even scan and archive them for you.
We extract value from the paper by using it to check your
employees’ expense claims as well as recover your VAT. If your
receipts have already been scanned, we could also perform
audits on the scanned images of your receipts.
It means we aren’t here just to create process savings for your
organization; we reduce your travel costs too.
Why CFOs like Expenseflo
• Minimized expense-handling process costs
• Full reporting of expenses provided
• Maximized employee expense compliance
• Seamless integration with card provider, ERP and
accounts payable systems
• Maximized VAT Recovery – a business in which Meridian
is the world leader
Why travel managers like Expenseflo
• Optimized compliance with preferred supplier policy
• Full spending data provided to aid supplier negotiations
• Emotion removed from enforcing travel policy
• Seamless integration with corporate travel self-booking tools
Why business travelers like Expenseflo
• Reduced time for filing expense claims
• Reduced time for approving and reimbursing expenses
• Greater clarity about which expenses are acceptable and
which are not. In our experience, most employees follow rules
as long as they know what they are

Expenseflo EMA
Expense
management
application –
Expenseflo EMA
(or third-party
provider)
Expense
receipts
auditing –
Expenseflo
EXPENSE AUDIT
Why should we introduce an automated
expense management application?
It is estimated that well under half of corporations have an
automated expense management application. If you are not one
of the converted yet, here is why you should have one:
Reduced travel costs
• Management information provided for supplier negotiation
• Traveler compliance boosted with preferred suppliers,
via pre-trip approval
Reduced process costs
• Many manual, paper-based tasks are eliminated, reducing
processing costs by up to 80%
Reduced employee and management time
• Radically reduced time taken for business travelers to
complete expense claims and receive reimbursement
• Easy one-click approval for line managers
VAT recovery –
Expenseflo
VAT RECOVERY
Complete Expense Management

I’m convinced. We need an expense
management application. But why should we
choose Expenseflo EMA?
Expenseflo EMA excels in its simplicity of use and integration,
while being flexible enough to handle the complexities of widely
differing reporting requirements in each country.
Simplicity – ease of use
The tool could not be easier for travelers to complete their expense
claims or for line managers to approve them. In fact, if there are
no problems with the claim, approval takes a single click.
Simplicity – ease of integration
Expense management applications need to be highly adaptable
to what you currently have. They have to integrate with your
internal systems and workflow. They also have to work smoothly
with a range of third-party systems, from online booking tools to
ERPs. (As an independent company, we do not favor one booking
tool in preference to all others.)
Expenseflo EMA has been developed on software architecture,
which ensures it integrates easily with other systems.
Benefits include:
• ASP-hosted – quick to implement
• Any time, any place access for travelers and approvers
• On-demand, real-time reporting
• Multi-lingual help desk support
• Full paper digitization, indexing and e-archiving service
Your expense management application
or ours?
Our expense management application, Expenseflo EMA,
is the best on the market. However, we recognize many
companies already have an expense management
application and do not want to change that.
That’s not a problem. We can plug any expense
management application (or more than one) of your
choice into Expenseflo EXPENSE AUDIT and Expenseflo
VAT RECOVERY so you can get the full benefit of complete
expense management.

Expenseflo EXPENSE AUDIT
Expense
management
application –
Expenseflo EMA
(or third-party
provider)
One expense claim in eight is incorrect
Our Expenseflo EXPENSE AUDIT experts can check every one of
your business travelers’ expense receipts against their expense
claims for accuracy and policy compliance.
We find that on average one expense claim in eight needs
amending. Some errors are accidental, some deliberate.
Either way, they can cost your company a lot of money.
Significant savings
The results speak for themselves. When one major European
manufacturer signed up for Expenseflo EXPENSE AUDIT,
our team found $4.9 million of savings in $88 million of
submitted expenses.
Why not?
Expense
receipts
auditing –
Expenseflo
EXPENSE AUDIT
Each year, approximately 15,000 companies worldwide
including over 50% of the Fortune 500 send Meridian their
travelers’ receipts to recover the VAT on them. Since we are
already looking at all that paper for you, why not let Expenseflo
audit those same receipts for accuracy and policy compliance?
VAT recovery –
Expenseflo
VAT RECOVERY
Complete Expense Management
“Expenseflo has delivered
savings of $2,400,000”
Lawrence Vanderbijl
EMEA Disbursements Manager
Global Financial Services
Sun Microsystems

How it works
1. What the traveler does
One of the main advantages of the system is the traveler has
so little to do. They submit their online expense report and put
all their receipts in a pre-addressed envelope, which is sent to
Meridian. That’s all. If your company already scans the receipts,
Meridian would arrange for the scanned images to be transferred
to us.
2. Receipt matching
The Expenseflo EXPENSE AUDIT team matches each line on the
expense report against the paper receipts or scanned images.
They verify details including:
• Receipt amount – does it match the claim? For example, has
the business traveler claimed $600 for a $60 receipt?
• Receipt type – has the expense been correctly categorized
as taxi, rail, hotel, etc.? This is very important for tax authority
declarations.
• Is there an original VAT receipt? For example, business
travelers often incorrectly assume an express check-out hotel
statement is a valid VAT receipt.
• Is the currency conversion accurate?
3. Checking claims against policy compliance
Our expert auditors analyze each line of your business travelers’
reports to spot any claims that breach the policy. Examples include:
• Exceeding limits for meals
• Incurring car rental refueling charges
• Claiming both per diem and actual expenses
• Claiming for in-room movies/mini bars and other
non-allowable items
• Using non-preferred vendors
4. Following up invalid claims
If there are no problems with the claim, payment is authorized
and the receipts passed on to the Expenseflo VAT RECOVERY
team. If there is a problem, we do one of three things according
to what you tell us you want:
a) Refuse ineligible lines in the claim
b) Send the query to the traveler, explaining which line in the
report is being queried and why it breaches company policy
c) Send the query to the traveler’s line manager
5. Full multi-lingual support
If travelers are at all unclear, they can call our unique
multi-lingual Help Desk to resolve issues. Our staff speaks more
than 20 languages between them.
6. Management information –
including preferred supplier auditing
We send our client a full summary of spend total, claims refused
(and reasons), etc. Expenseflo can also help clients audit their
preferred supplier agreements. Are travelers paying at hotel
check-out the room rates negotiated by their procurement team?
Data from Expenseflo will tell you the answer.

Expenseflo VAT RECOVERY
Expense
management
application –
Expenseflo EMA
(or third-party
provider)
If your company does European travel, you would benefit from
our world-leading VAT recovery service. The final stage of the
Expenseflo complete travel management system is Meridian’s
VAT recovery process. We help you maximize your local and
foreign VAT claims.
In case you are not familiar with VAT recovery, here is a
quick summary:
Why recover VAT?
It is estimated that companies could reduce their travel budgets
by 4% if they recovered all applicable VAT.
What we do
Our experts check every receipt to identify all incurred local and
foreign VAT.
Expense
receipts
auditing –
Expenseflo
EXPENSE AUDIT
Local VAT is reported back to the client and uploaded directly to
the client’s ERP or other financial accounting package.
Foreign VAT is claimed from the relevant foreign authorities on
behalf of the client and handled from submission to refund.
VAT recovery –
Expenseflo
VAT RECOVERY
Complete Expense Management
However, this process is not as easy as it sounds. European
Commission reckons more than half of major corporations fail
to recover VAT incurred on foreign trips – and the figure for
smaller businesses is even higher. It is estimated that €5 billion
of potential refunds go unrecovered in the EU alone each year.
The reason many companies fail to recover their VAT is that it is
time-consuming, highly technical and very easy to get wrong.
VAT claims have to be presented to each country’s tax authorities
in completely different ways with all original receipts present
and correct. Each country has different rules about what VAT is
recoverable, with plenty of details to trip you up, like whether a
meal was for clients or for coworkers only.
Expertise and experience
We are the world leaders in VAT Recovery. Each year
we handle more than $420 million in claims and to date
we have recovered refunds of more than $3.5 billion for
our clients.
“Engaging with Meridian has enabled Airbus to work with
real experts on expense claim control and VAT recovery solutions.”
Marie-Laure Moncamp
Head of Travel Management
Airbus

Summary of Expenseflo benefits
Significant cost and spend reduction
EMA AUDIT VAT Recovery
Reduced process costs • • •
Reduced IT expenditure •
Credit card data pre-population, minimizing manual data entry •
Compliance
Consistent application of travel policy
Accurate returns of VAT, reducing exposure to risk (penalties)
and ensuring compliance with legislation
Reconciliation of actual receipt against spend
Paper free office-archival service
• •
•
•
•
Enhanced employee experience
Ease of use: anywhere, anytime
Multi-lingual help desk
Automated calculations, reducing human error
Real-time status for submitted expenses
Split of business and private expenses
Speedy reimbursement
Simpler, consistent process
•
•
• •
Visibility and reporting
Highlights policy violations, facilitating focused reviews • •
Assists with planning and forecasting • • •
Business intelligence enhances supplier selection • • •
VAT
Maximization of VAT resulting in a positive impact on cash flow •
Global expertise and reach • • •
Well-established relationships with VAT authorities •
Restyling invoices •
Meridian Westchester Financial Center, 50 Main Street, Suite 274, White Plains, NY 10606, USA
T: 212.554.6617 F: 914.328.3325 E: sales.us@meridianglobalservices.com
www.meridianglobalservices.com
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