The companies are trying to decrease their company travel expenses without, however, compromising anything from the way they file, manage and report their data. If something, they are seeking more granularity, modularity, and control without increasing their IT expense.

A Travel And Expense Management Software will help you to keep track of all your business expenses including traveling expenses and make your work much simpler and you can easily eliminate the expenses that are not required and it also eliminates human errors which can be helpful in boosting your business profits.

So this is just what the ideal T&E software program of the future should look like to cater to an increasingly choosy and sophisticated customers base:

1) Multi-Policy Capability.

Most companies nowadays do not possess a specific business travel plan in writing. Even if they actually do, their T&E software program more often than not is for one particular "standard" plan which applies throughout the board, from the CEO to the graphic designer in the multi-media department. A great T&E program would allow the managers to generate various project accounts and then match up the expense reports against various policies entered into the system. Why must the Chairwoman of the Board be limited to the same room or rental vehicle allowance as the junior sales engineer who became a member of the company just a few days before?

2) Open-Ended Horizontal Integration.

The T&E program of the future must be able to handle not just the meals, accommodation, air, and rental vehicle expenses like the majority of traditional T&E programs do but other types of expenses as well like Internet and web-related expenditures, train and sea travels, training expenses, professional expenses, and even healthcare expenses, and so forth. The program should be open-ended enough to accommodate any and all expenditure categories without compromising anything from scalability or dependability.

3) Vertical Modularity.

The perfect T&E software program needs to be modular enough to allow the managers to select their own level of vertical integration in dealing with their organization's travel accounts.

For example, at the one end of the vertical integration spectrum must be the T&E expenditure submissions and reporting application alone. On the other end, the software should be able to connect with any hotel or car rental booking program, or credit card module, on one hand, and the company's Accounts Payable or Payroll modules, on the other. With a software like that, a company would not have to pay for any needless modules because the software does not come as a "take it or leave it" chunk. Why must, for example, a corporation pay a really expensive hotel-air-car reserving module if all travel arrangements are already made in-house? If a customer desires just the bare-bones T&E functions, she should be able to obtain only that and save money.

4) Platform Freedom.

The ideal T&E software should really be platform agnostic. That is, it should be able to operate not just on any Operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux) but should be accessible by using any device ranging from the classic desk-tops to PDAs and iPhones. It should be browser-agnostic too (IE, Firefox, Safari) so that it may be accessed through the Internet from any area on earth.

5) Zero Local IT Overhead.

The T&E software program of the future must get rid of the need to buy expensive software and hardware and maintain them locally. There should need to download any security updates or patches and no requirement to hire a team of highly paid technicians only to keep the T&E servers functioning properly 24x7.

6) Audit-Ready Compliance Capability.

We live in a post-Sarbanes-Oxley world in which all publicly owned financial institutions in the United States are mandated to document their business transactions. Since in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 organization managers are personally accountable for unauthorized and incorrect expenses in their departments, they take the need for consistent, secure and organized documentation very seriously. An excellent T&E program must thus generate detailed reports showing which travel requests have been approved or denied when and by which manager on the basis of which policy, etc.

With the use of a Procurement Management System, one can keep track of the raw materials going in and out of the company along with proper payments, without wasting much time and efforts. BAZ is a procurement management system that has many other extra features too that will be helpful for you in boosting your business.

7) Secure, Unique and Time-Stamped Tagging.

It must also tag each transaction (which includes T&E related e-mail demands, expense filings, faxed receipts, etc.) with an encrypted, unique and time-stamped code to prevent fraud and post-facto adjustments.