Member Article

Palette Introduces New Expenses Processing Product to PaletteArena

Palette, the leading enterprise purchase-to-payment specialist, has launched a new expenses product to automate and manage processing of employee expenses. The product, PaletteExpense, can also be configured to enable staff to handle their own expense receipts and claims, within pre-defined limits.

PaletteExpense give finance staff flexible control over all expense-related parameters, and an easy-to-read dashboard overview of expenses claimed and owed to employees, together with cash advances and reconciliations. This eases the administrative burden for staff in processing and approving expense claims, while delivering more accurate, timely tracking and payment of expenses. The new product is part of the company’s core suite, PaletteArena, available as a cloud service or as an on-premise solution.

Palette’s CEO, Lars Ola Petters, said: “Expenses processing can be very time-consuming for accounting staff, because of the range of disbursement types and variations in allowable expenses for different employees. PaletteExpense automates much of the work involved in expense collection and approval, saving time for both accounts teams and for employees claiming their expenses. It gives any business better visibility of and control over all types of staff expense payments.”

Finance staff use PaletteExpense to set up profiles for individuals, which include limits for different types of business expense (for example, travel, hotels, client entertainment, subsistence, taxis), exchange rate variations and workflow rules. Employees then build their expense claims by taking a picture of receipts using their smartphone or tablet, and emailing the details to a single dedicated email address at their company. PaletteExpense matches the sender’s email address to the relevant employee profile, and automatically populates an expense line together with the submitted images of receipts – saving time for finance staff.

Receipts can also be scanned using a multifunction device and sent by email, or saved locally and uploaded directly to the expense claim when the user returns to the office.

When the expense line for an employee is completed, it is then checked against the pre-defined rules, with only exceptional items that exceed the pre-determined limits for specific items in PaletteExpense requiring intervention from finance staff. Claims can then be cleared for payment, and the records exported to the company’s ERP or business systems.

PaletteArena is a complete enterprise purchase-to-payment suite, enabling users to achieve significant, measurable cost savings and efficiency gains in processing supplier invoices and purchase orders. It includes the PaletteInvoice, PaletteExpense, PaletteBuyer, PaletteContract and PaletteSupplier Portal products, giving a web-based end-to-end solution that improves invoice management from receipt to payment. It integrates easily with a wide range of accounting, information and business systems to automate and streamline accounts payable activity across the organisation, and is available both as an on-premise and a cloud solution.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lucy Beck .