OpenText has introduced a new product that works with the SAP Travel Management application to eliminate the need to move paper receipts around in order to process expense reports.

It aims to help companies significantly lower the cost and time involved with processing reimbursements, while also reducing the burden on travelling employees. The new solution will be resold by SAP as the SAP Travel Receipts Management application by OpenText.

"SAP Travel Receipts Management is a great example of how ECM technology fully optimises SAP solutions by integrating content in this case travel receipts into SAP business processes," said Patrick Barnert, Vice President, SAP Solutions at Open Text.

"We continued to see strong demand among customers for better ways to manage all forms of business content within the context of their SAP solution-based environments using OpenText solutions."

SAP Travel Receipts Management by OpenText gives users of SAP Travel Management a full set of tools to eliminate the hassle associated with processing paper receipts. It integrates with multi-function devices, scanning applications, fax machines and email to make it easy to capture images of receipts.

With mobile device support, travelling employees can simply use digital cameras or phones to capture receipt images. The digitised receipts are then stored in a repository and linked to appropriate trip information and accessible through standard SAP user interfaces.

The payoff from fully automating travel receipts processing can be substantial. In a recent survey report entitled "Travel & Expense Management Benchmarking," PayStream Advisors writes that, "On average, a company spent approximately US$22.15 to process an expense report, if the process was entirely manual. This was twice as much as the processing costs accrued by companies that are fully automated.

“Organisations that have some automation in place have been successful in driving down processing costs per transaction to US$18.67, whereas companies that are fully automated and using an integrated system have a per transaction cost as low as US$10.68."

Beyond lowering costs, fully automated solutions such as SAP Travel Receipts Management lighten the burden on travelling employees since they can simply use email and self-service applications to submit receipts rather than having to prepare and mail paper receipts. In turn, because paper documentation no longer needs to be routed around, approval and processing cycles are shorter leading to quicker reimbursements. Should questions arise, managers have immediate access to a comprehensive audit of receipt source documents.