MarketStar

The problem

• Manual processing of more than 7,500 expense reports per year, most from remote locations
• Expense disbursements often delayed by several weeks
• Critical need for accuracy and coding of expenses since expenses are billed back to clients
• Administrators manually checked all expense reports for accuracy and policy compliance

The solution

• Centralized corporate expense management reporting process into a single point of contact eliminating redundancy
• Automatically pre-populates expense reports with corporate card data
• Audit feature automatically flags expenses that are not in compliance with policies
• Seamless integration of expense system with general ledger and accounts payable

The benefits

• Nearly $1 million in savings has been realized representing a 19% return rate per year
• Reduced administrator headcount from three full time employees to a single individual
• Negotiated rates with preferred vendors has resulted in over $134,000 in savings
• Enabled quick and accurate expense bill back to the appropriate client and project
• Reduced the time to reimburse employees from several weeks to just a few days

A pioneer in sales and marketing outsourcing solutions, Ogden Utah-based MarketStar has staked their business on the outsourcing proposition. Consequently, when it came to automating their expense reporting process, they understood their interests would be best served by outsourcing the job to a Corporate Expense Management best-of-breed vendor.

Employing approximately 1,200 employees, 650 of which regularly file expense reports, MarketStar's accounting department was drowning in a sea of expense reports. Three full-time employees were required to manually process, audit, and approve some 300 expense reports per week.

"It was like trying to build a dam when the flood waters were rising around your knees," says Jeff Jones, controller for MarketStar. "We could never get ahead of the curve and it was all we could do to just keep pace. In addition to report processing, our staff was also required to audit every single expense report to ensure that reports were accurately tabulated and all expenses were properly coded."

In 2000, MarketStar decided it was time to evaluate what the corporate expense management market had to offer. After carefully evaluating the offerings from Geac Extensity and Concur, MarketStar decided that Concur offered the most robust corporate expense management offering. MarketStar points to the usability of Concur® Expense, its ability to easily integrate with other back-office financial applications, and Concur's proven track record of deployment as the primary reasons for its selection.

"We were impressed with the range of deployments and the years of experience that Concur had under their belt and admired their commitment to helping their customers maximize ROI over the long haul," says Jones.

MarketStar chose to phase the deployment of Concur Expense beginning in October of 2000. The first group began using the system three months later in January of 2001 and every four weeks a new group was added to the system. "By phasing our deployment we were able to troubleshoot and calibrate the application in a controlled environment prior to full roll out," says Jones.

Before deploying Concur Expense, MarketStar's accounting department was perceived in large part as a compliance enforcer. "In many cases, employees never physically met their accounts payable managers and consequently, their only connection to the company might be through the accounting department. In essence, we're a lifeline to our employees who rely on us to receive their paychecks and expense reimbursements in a timely manner. Since deploying Concur Expense, our department is perceived in a much friendlier light which goes a long way towards building goodwill on behalf of our dispersed workforce."

The ability to customize the Concur Expense application was another critical criteria for MarketStar. "Approximately 80 percent of our employee expenses are billed back to our clients. Because our clients have their own expense policies in place, it was necessary for us to build customized rules into the application. MarketStar remote employees often work on a variety of projects – thus, it's critical that employees can not only tie their expenses to a specific client but can also map it to a specific project."

Looking ahead, MarketStar is looking forward to bringing its Canadian-based employees on to the corporate expense management system and recently installed Concur's business intelligence pack with the goal of extracting greater intelligence from their expense data. "Our annual spend is in the millions of dollars. We have learned that if we apply a small degree of intelligence to the expense management process we can further maximize our ROI and improve our bottom line," claims Jones. "Concur has enabled us to do just that."