June 2008 - Almost every corporation with a travel policy monitors compliance, but doing so is a challenge since information gathering tends to be only partially automated. Improved visibility of activity processed by both the preferred travel management company and the corporate card provider offers guidance on how to shape policy and where some rogue spending occurs. Integration of card and agency data also can help travel buyers represent a greater portion of their business in supplier negotiations.
To this end, Carlson Wagonlit Travel in April launched its Agency+Card Reporting as part of the travel management company's Program Management Center, adding monthly payment data from major providers to its existing next-day travel booking data and creating a variety of reports incorporating both. CWT co-developed the offering with TRX, which matches CWT client bookings with credit card transactions for air, rail, hotel and rental car services, and reports the results to CWT for alignment with client information and CWT's proprietary supplier databases.
Reports run on the 10th of each month for the previous month's activity in 17 nations and are available in multiple currencies and languages. They offer graphical, dashboard-based information about performance against goals regarding the utilization of CWT or the preferred card (or both) for air and hotel transactions, as well as least compliant travelers.
"Seven in-depth, transaction-level data reports are one click away from the dashboards," according to CWT. "They include an agency compliance summary for air/rail, hotel and car rental transactions. Three additional spend reports for air/rail, hotel and rental car consolidate all bookings to capture total travel spend and increase leverage during negotiations ... by indicating actual rates versus negotiated rates" and "shedding light on noncompliant traveler preferences and amenities."
CWT said card and travel data integration was at the top of its client wish lists. Global product director of corporate card and expense management Dawn Raasch called the program "an enhanced offering," acknowledging that it comes with additional fees that are determined case by case with clients. However, Raasch said, "return on investment is well over 10 times the cost of the product." In addition to possible negotiating benefits, the offering helps optimize policy and improve compliance, which CWT said can cut 20 percent in travel costs.
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"With card, we get the majority of the opportunity, which allows clients to start attacking the compliance issue. It's actionable information."
— Loren Brown, CWT chief information officer and executive vice president for technology and product management
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Now, CWT has turned to adding expense report information to further widen the picture by including transactions not touched by the corporate card or preferred agency. Comparisons of payment and travel data streams have shown that, for example, CWT books between 40 percent and 60 percent of a typical client's hotel rooms charged to the preferred credit card. Expense data also would factor in rooms paid for with personal cards.
"Certainly, expense is where the rubber hits the road," according to TRX president and CEO Trip Davis, who said CWT is the only TMC using TRX's services this way. "That's where the employee is getting reimbursed. The biggest challenge is timing, since it depends on when the employee gets around to finishing the expense report. Some are notorious for doing all their expense reports at the end of the year."
Another challenge is matching up vendor names on purchases not prepopulated from card feeds in the expense management system, or not facilitated by the nascent e-receipts concept developed by the likes of Concur. If merchant or vendor information doesn't come in on the front end, it's up to the traveler to input it into electronic expense systems, making data matching difficult. "They will be entering all that in manually," said Raasch. "How do you bump that up to supplier databases so we can provide that consistent view? With the card, we know what the merchant identification is in Diners or Amex."
Corporate card usage hangs at around 72 percent for even "best in class" companies, according to an Aberdeen Group April 2008 study of 160 companies. That figure drops to 61 percent for "average" firms and 47 percent for "laggards." Forty-three percent of firms require corporate card use for all business expenses, according to Aberdeen, although various polls have shown that clients increasingly are considering
mandated corporate card programs. At the same time, very few organizations have a single, automated expense system globally.
"With card, we get the majority of the opportunity, which allows clients to start attacking the compliance issue," said CWT chief information officer and executive vice president for technology and product management Loren Brown. "It's actionable information."
