When it comes to travel and expense data, most expense solutions provide only fixed dashboards with limited editing and sharing capabilities. These limited capabilities lead to low adoption, meaning low spend awareness from the users' side and low control on costs for Finance professionals.
With Insights, we want to change that. We want to give our users access to all their data in a visual way that works for them, not one that they must work around. Today, we are taking you through a tour of our new Insights module.
Learn from your data with Mobilexpense Insights
What is “New” about Insights? In short: everything. Our Product team has completely revamped Insights from the ground up, starting with the technology powering it.
Insights presents a complete way to report on expenses at both entity and group level, visualise expense data at item level, dig into your approval process, receive alerts and more. All within self-service boards that company users can edit and share among themselves.
Let’s dive in!
Get into the details at line-item level
With the new Mobilexpense Insights, controllers, supervisors and company reporters can report at transaction line-item level.
This means that they can view transactions based on any of the following attributes:
- Group
- Company
- Cost Centre
- Project/Task
- Geographical information
- Categories, incl. custom categories
- Merchant
- Transaction type
- Custom fields
Why is this important? Because it allows users to deep dive into the company spend data to see actuals and identify trends as well as cost saving opportunities with top and bottom spender lists. It also gives users a view on expense compliance - including outliers. This is a powerful tool to ensure that every euro is well spent and improve efficiency and profitability.
Analyse your approval process - and its shortcomings
Employees aren’t generally fond of waiting for their employer to reimburse their legitimate business expenses. And unhappy employees tend to be less productive employees. So once an expense report is submitted, it is in everyone’s interest that it be approved and paid as quickly as possible. Yet the approval process is often painfully lengthy, leading to disgruntled employees.
The Mobilexpense Insights module gives users a view on cycle times at report level. This allows them to see how long it takes for a report to go through the approval, control and payment process. It enables them to identify bottlenecks within departments or with certain users - and deal with them appropriately to speed up the process.
This module also provides reporting on expense rejections. Users are able to see the number of rejections for a given person, expense report, department or more as well as the different reasons given for the rejections. In particular, there are views that track delays per employee, cost centre, entity and even payment method.
Data such as this makes it possible to identify “poor performers” with a high number of rejections and regular occurrences. It also gives you the data to revise your expense policy, aligning it with the reality faced by the people on the ground. For example, if your employees' hotel invoices in Switzerland are regularly rejected based on cost, maybe the expense policy should be reviewed to align with the actual cost of hotel rooms there.
Collaborate on reports with your colleagues
Most common expense reporting tools give users a fixed dashboard with limited sharing capabilities. This means that if different users want to access a dashboard, the data must be downloaded first, then shared.
Mobilexpense Insights offers users a single, collaborative workspace shared by the entire team. All users are able to view and work on the same reports, create and share dashboards or copy and edit them from each other. They have full freedom when it comes to configuring their dashboards including adding or removing fields and zooming in on a given domain such as cost centre, project, or entity. Tech savvy users can even create their own metrics or groupings. And users can set up scheduled reports to themselves or each other to share data openly and easily.
With Insights, users are all on the same page, looking at the same data and are thus able to make better data-driven decisions, faster.
Deep dive into your exported reports with other tools
Mobilexpense Insights reports and dashboards can be exported to different file types for further analysis or to be shared with external parties:
- flat file (.csv)
- Excel (.xlsx)
- PDF (for visuals)
Exports to these file formats can be scheduled and delivered by email to any users at a chosen periodicity.
Be notified of anomalies and surpassed thresholds
Users can set up their own notifications in Mobilexpense Insights to receive alerts when given thresholds are passed. These alerts are configured in a dashboard with filters based on dimensions such as categories, descriptions or names. The numeric thresholds can be set with a trigger “above” or “below” the chosen number.
Mobilexpense users can therefore detect anomalies and act upon them before potential issues can snowball or cause wider problems in the organisation.
Why the Insights revamp?
We are always reviewing, investing in and improving our products to provide our customers with the best possible features and user experience. Within this mindset, we took a hard look at our Analytics module and made the decision to rework it from the ground up with new technology to give our customers the in-depth analysis capabilities that they want - and need - to optimise their spend processes.
We expanded the capabilities of our previous Analytics module, improving the self-service aspect as well as the breadth of data that could be reported on. We have also made the new Analytics a lot more dynamic. Users can build their own dashboards, graphs and extracts.
Ultimately, we want to make it easier for our customers to consolidate their travel and expense data. This data integration will make for more accurate total cost analysis and allow users to find links between data, spot deviations and detect anomalies. We want our customers to feel empowered by their data and to make the reporting choices that best suit them; benefitting from our expertise but without having to rely on it for report-building.
Mobilexpense Insights in a nutshell
Analytics not only provides you with spend awareness, it is also an opportunity for your Finance team to gain better control on spend through this enhanced visibility on expense data, including trends and actuals. Ultimately, this data arms you and your team with the knowledge to make improvements and increase your bottom line.
Whether it’s human error, attempted fraud or lax spenders, you have the power to avoid unnecessary cash out and make the most of every euro.
