Automating Expense Management: Streamlining and Efficiencies for Managing Campus Travel & Expense Spend

J. Michael Gower - Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Anne Gutsick - Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Elizabeth Downs - Huron Consulting Group
Elizabeth Rees - SAP Concur

Costs keep rising, budgets are tightening, the financial landscape keeps changing. Every spending moment matters. There’s no room for financial inefficiency to work its way into your campus. When travel, expense, and invoice processes are frustrating for staff and approvals, or audits are cumbersome for finance teams, then nobody wins.

How have your peer schools navigated the journey to automating with AI and ML, and what is keeping you behind? Is there a resistance to changing the way you’ve always managed and reimbursed expenses and travel and managing your vendors? Is managing change across many organizations across the school simply too challenging?

Is it time to hear the journey directly from your peers?

This session will feature 1-2 schools sharing their story on the modernization journey on how and when they recognized the need to make truly impactful change, and who they needed to enlist. How 100% auditing of all expenses with the aid of AI elevates compliance, all while saving them time and freeing up staff to work on other more valuable projects than chasing down random receipts. How spending and travel policy compliance becomes enforceable through automation thus adhering to grants and funds requirements. How managing the many vendors each school utilizes can be done from anywhere at any time and trains your vendors to comply with your automated environments.

You can’t keep solving today’s challenges with yesterday’s solutions. By automating and connecting your expenses, travel, and invoice solutions, you’re making impactful decisions on improving every spending moment. You’re elevating more certainty, more efficiency, and more savings for your institution. It’s like having a personal assistant that never sleeps, always follows the rules, and frees up your team to focus on what truly matters – achieving your school’s goals.

Learning Objectives

  1. Demonstrate how to incorporate best practices on developing guidelines for instituting a cross-campus travel authorization, booking and expense reporting business process.
  2. Define compliance policies across the institution for spending across employee and guest travel that accommodate a remote or hybrid workforce.
  3. Conduct user adoption strategies and training to comply with your automation practices to streamline payments.

CPE Available

  • 1 Credit: Information Technology