Organizations of all sizes often struggle to effectively manage their expenses, and one of the pain points can be the company’s corporate travel program. Busy road warriors may submit their travel expenses late or forget to submit them at all. Out-of-policy purchases don’t always get flagged, which makes policy compliance a struggle. Industry-wide, many businesses could benefit from a holistic, reliable expense solution.

This is one of the many reasons why we are introducing Avenir, our intuitive and connected experience for travel, expense, and meetings management. In Direct Travel’s recent blog series, I have answered some of your questions about Avenir and shared more about each of its key technology partners. First up was Spotnana and their Travel-as-a-Service platform. Next, we learned about TROOP’s meeting planning and group travel logistics.

Today, we will see how Center’s complete, connected corporate card and expense management solution helps users gain real-time visibility, control, and flexibility all in one place.

Why Expense Management Must Evolve

Center recognizes that for much of our industry, the “traditional” spend management process is challenging. These are a sample of their findings from a recent survey of 200+ U.S. finance leaders:

• Although 46% have increased corporate card distribution to help control employee expenses, only 2% took the next step of adopting the necessary spend management software.
• Nearly half said they had a major issue with the excessive time they were spending on expense reports.
• 60% expressed a desire to replace their current systems with a solution that integrates travel, expense, and card management.

Many found that their previous methods of managing spend were draining resources across the board. To help ease a variety of manual expense challenges, Center created an intelligent solution backed by their first-class level of service and support.

How Center Powers Smart Businesses

Center is reinventing expense management with a more configurable and extensible solution that takes a card-centric approach. It lets approvers see spend as it happens – turning every swipe into intelligence for better business decisions.

The CenterCard and connected software give businesses real-time visibility into all employee spending. Center automates traditional expensing and accounting tasks, modernizes travel booking, and provides finance teams with the controls and data needed for optimal decision making.

Center is easily customized to your accounting practices and approval workflows, and is delivered in a usage-based business model. It's designed to be self-serve and is able to evolve as business needs change.

How Your Team Can Benefit from Center

From efficient deployment to ongoing support, Center makes managing expenses easy regardless of your role in your organization:

Spenders use the CenterCard and mobile app to submit receipts in real-time, eliminating the need for traditional batch-based expense reports. This means less time being frustrated by cumbersome processes and fumbling with outdated tech, and more time focusing on priorities.

Approvers use the web app to efficiently authorize expenses. Center leverages automation and dynamic policies to streamline enforcement and drive better spending behavior. This saves time by identifying normal spending patterns and highlighting any spend that's out of policy (including off-platform travel bookings). Additionally, approval routing is highly configurable, so approvers can route expenses by project, job, department, spend amount, or category.

Finance teams normally spend multiple hours accounting for expenses and reconciling them to corporate card statements, but Center cuts this time down to minutes. They not only provide a real-time foundation for audits and approvals, but also for posting, reconciliation, and analyzing spend. This real-time visibility and maximum card control in one central location gives finance teams everything they need to manage all employee expenses (including travel!)

Business Travelers Can Have The Perfect Trip

From Center’s expense management, to TROOP’s group travel and meeting planning, and Spotnana’s infrastructure and “plumbing,” these leading providers all serve as the backbone of Avenir’s open platform. Plus, the beauty of building an open platform is that we will continue to welcome other innovators to join us in this pursuit of #ThePerfectTrip.

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