It's now a classic in Travel Management news: quantifying the time wasted and frustration of business travellers when it comes to processing their expense claims. But of course, when the study is signed by a player like ConcurThis finding is gaining in legitimacy and therefore in interest. The survey was carried out by OpinionWay in mid-September, questioning 510 employees on the French market. The results are quite edifying: a single expense claim would mobilise 27 minutes on the employee's working time, and so much energy lost for the company. More than one in five travellers would even spend more than 30 minutes to this laborious task.
These results, presented at the annual Concur FusionThe Concur study also estimates that the French market has plenty of room for improvement, since only 41% of those surveyed have an expense management solution that can digitise paper receipts, with almost all of them (95%) expressing satisfaction. The majority of employees (59%) do not have an expense management software solution that allows them to scan their paper expense receipts themselves. Of these, 68% would appear to be stuck at the paper form or Excel file stage...
This is where one of Concur's long-awaited new features for French business travellers comes in. Following in the footsteps of their American counterparts, who have already been equipped for at least two years, French professionals now have access to the ExpenseIt tool, which extracts invoice data by means of a simple photograph. The functionality is based on a character recognition (OCR)a technical brick combined with human expertise that controls the extraction of poorly recognised fields.
This technical advance is part of a legal context for dematerialisation. A decree published in the Journal Officiel on 30 March " authorises companies to keep invoices originally issued on paper in digital format "explains Concur's management team. " This decree opens up new opportunities for them in terms of productivity, since they now have the possibility of freeing themselves not only from the time-consuming and non-value-added tasks of managing paper documents, but also from the cost of storage, which can last up to 10 years, and of handling archives in the event of an audit. "they add.
