Infor Expense Management is a travel and entertainment expense management solution. It is a suite of four integrated application, (Expense Reports, Travel Plans, Payment Request, Timesheets), which we will discuss in-depth further in the blog. Infor Expense Management helps eliminate manual processes since supporting mobile usage and social collaboration and becoming available for both in the cloud or on-premise.

As you are well aware, expense management is an integral part of many businesses. This normally involves employee travel and entertainment expenses. Yet Aberdeen Report found that 53 per cent of businesses are still managing their travel expenses manually; gone should be days of manually reporting expenses. It is both a demanding and potentially risky process. All this time wasted, used energy and risk of resources can be regained with the use of cloud-based expense management systems.

Running a team of more than 4,900 financial advisors serving 1.8 million accounts in more than 2,200 locations worldwide is no easy task. For Raymond James Financial - a Florida-based financial services company - managing their employees’ expenses is among the most challenging aspects of their business.

The term T&E stands for travel and entertainment - any expenses incurred by travelling for business purposes or entertaining a business client. Examples of travelling expenses include money spent on accommodation, transportation, and meals. T&E expense management is an important operating cost to manage because your company's T&E budget is one of the critical places where you could look to reduce costs. Unfortunately, expense management and reimbursements for travelling employees are among the most time-consuming and repetitive manual business processes that companies face.

According to Hospitality Technology’s “2016 Lodging Technology Study,” 62% of surveyed hoteliers use business intelligence (BI) tools and another 16% will add them within 18 months. Armed with the right information, today’s decision-makers can better understand risk, performance, and the impact of decisions at property, region and group levels. But how exactly can hotels achieve competitive advantages with business intelligence?

It is safe to say most businesses would resort to cost cutting initiatives in a time of tight margins and high risks. However, a research by McKinsey shows that only 26% of those cost-reduction programs, still yield effective results after four years. CFOs, therefore, are increasingly turning to zero-based budgeting, ZBB, as a more sustainable approach to cost reduction.  

Electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) is the transmission, reception, and processing of digital transactional documents between suppliers and buyers. A true e-invoicing method should be entirely electronic in such a way that data from the supplier can be integrated directly into the buyer’s system. E-invoicing benefits both suppliers and buyers. 

Upgrading revenue management capabilities means not only implementing the right technology solution and integrating the right data sources — ones that have been shown to improve forecast accuracy and pricing decisions — but also putting the right organisational resources in place and creating a revenue-focused culture. Following are a few recommendations for hoteliers to keep in mind. 

The demand for next-generation revenue management solutions has increased with the proliferation of online travel agencies (OTAs) with differing pricing and commission structures, shrinking booking windows, ever-more intense hotel competition in high-demand destinations and ever-increasing pressure to drive profitable growth.

As disruptors like Airbnb is transforming the entire hospitality industry with a wide range of services, not just lodging accommodations, the industry C-suite and decision makers have to move away from the traditional revenue management strategy in order to better maximising their profit.