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When losing expense receipts is a good idea
Telenor outsources expense management to GlobalExpense and saves 25% in associated admin costs.
Most finance departments spend too much time bogged down in administrative, labour intensive tasks, instead of participating in strategic planning that contributes to the growth of the organisation. This is an issue which all finance directors recognise and one to which they would welcome a cost-effective solution that also eases the route to tax and VAT compliance.
Telenor Business Solutions has solved this issue by relieving its finance department of the administrative overhead associated with the management of the expense procedure. By investing in GlobalExpense, a travel and expense business process outsourced solution, Telenor reduced its associated administrative costs by 25% within just five weeks of deciding to go with the tax experts.
GlobalExpense has moved Telenor's expense management process out-of-house. GlobalExpense handles and reconciles all of Telenor's paper receipts and provides them with electronic expense submission, electronic reporting, sign-off and management information, while integrating all expense claims into the company accounts. The solution has enabled Telenor to reduce head count in its purchase ledger team by 20% since February 2002, improve the finance department's workload and the quality of work being achieved. GlobalExpense has also freed-up resources within Telenor's finance department to focus on core activities such as business reporting and analysis, while helping to ensure that the company is fully tax and VAT compliant.
David Wragg, Finance Director at Telenor Business Solutions comments, 'We have 820 employees, 60-70 per cent of whom claim expenses on a regular basis. The overheads associated with processing these in a timely manner alone are gargantuan. Outsourcing the function to GlobalExpense has taken away the pain of dealing with the administrative burden.'
Telenor Business Solutions is a UK subsidiary of the leading Norwegian telecommunications group, which delivers Telenor's IT and communication solutions to the European business markets. The organisation is an amalgam of three UK Telenor companies that merged operationally in March 2001, each with a different procedure for employee expenses, loosely worked around a manual paper-based process.
Wragg explains, 'We had to put lots of effort into a travel and expense process that delivered no real value. Yet within five weeks of deciding to go with GlobalExpense, I had a single, cost-effective method to manage expense claims and had reduced my admin costs by 25%. Now we have made the easy savings and are working with GlobalExpense to get true value out of our travel and expense budget.'
GlobalExpense automates the whole claims process, enabling finance departments and line managers across the business to quickly and efficiently deal with the approval and payment of expense claims. Telenor Business Solutions is now in a position to review expenses more thoroughly by analysing data in GlobalExpense and so can more easily highlight false claims and maximises tax reclaims.
Furthermore, GlobalExpense is designed and managed by a team of tax and VAT experts who are constantly adjusting the system in line with rapidly changing legislation to help ensure that that customers are fully tax and VAT compliant and mitigate the risk of huge tax penalties.
Wragg concludes, 'Although initially we invested in GlobalExpense primarily to reduce costs, reduce the bulk of the administrative overhead in the finance departments, and provide a better service to our employees, the reality is that the benefits far outweigh these objectives. We have dramatically reduced the administrative worry of a finance process, while unloading the burden of legislative compliance - a headache pill which truly does continue to deliver considerable results to the finance department and the business as a whole.'
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