How Expenses Have Become Invisible for Proximus With Mobilexpense

Expense management
at Proximus before Mobilexpense

Before implementing Mobilexpense in 2008, Proximus used a self-developed application to manage business expenses. Receipt and payment reconciliation were performed manually and, overall, expense management was not centralised.

There was no department responsible for the control of expenses. Managers in charge of approval were often too busy or unaware of the policies to carry out effective controls, leading to errors being discovered only late in the process.

In parallel, most supplier invoices were already automatically processed without human intervention. This was achieved using matching between order forms, delivery notes and invoices.

In this context, Proximus wanted to handle travel expenses just as easily and reduce the manual work involved in travel and expense management (TEM). The company was interested in formalising the control process to reduce workloads and improve outcomes, leading to the collaboration with Mobilexpense.

Challenges

With its own T&E solution, Proximus lacked a mobile app. This made it challenging for employees to enter and approve expenses quickly and to obtain up to date expense reporting. Furthermore, the time-consuming nature of creating and maintaining a TEM tool in-house was monopolising valuable resources away from Proximus’ core business.

In parallel, frequent legal and fiscal updates, compliance and evolving technologies finally made Proximus look to the outside for a partner whose business it was to manage expenses.

Automation played a significant part in pushing the company towards integrating a travel and expense management partner. It allowed employees to reclaim their time away from expenses and spend it on higher added value tasks.

Ultimately, the company was on a path to digital transformation, and Mobilexpense became the partner of choice for expense digitisation.

Objectives

According to Laurence Kervyn de Meerendre, Director of Corporate Accounting, Proximus was looking for a solution to manage expense reports for business travel and other expenses in the context of the overall standardisation, optimisation, and automation of its operations. Mobilexpense was initially implemented with the main goal of reducing the workload in the accounting department.

Lastly, an important requirement for Proximus was the ability to create different user profiles, including a reduced scope for technicians to expense only certain types of costs. User profiles are a key component of Mobilexpense, making it an effective solution for large companies with multiple levels of hierarchy or scopes of work.

Solution implementation

Proximus has been a Mobilexpense customer since 2008 and recently renewed its contract. The renewal process started in December 2019 with information and scoping sessions around the upgrade to our latest solution and was concluded in early 2020.

During these sessions, Proximus’ pain points were reviewed, as was the expense process from both a conceptual and a practical point of view. Mobilexpense shared some best practices to help improve.

Proximus’ use of the solution based on the needs and requirements and an appropriate solution was crafted in response.

The upgrade and the implementation of our SpendCatcher Mobile app were concluded in a few weeks between February and early May with no issues, and the stakeholders were all very satisfied. Test users have responded positively to the new layout and mentioned finding it very intuitive from a user experience point of view.

Benefits

"Employees who travel a lot and their assistants now enjoy additional efficiency." says Laurence Kervyn de Meerendre - Director of Corporate Accounting, Proximus

Continuous improvement is important to both Proximus and Mobilexpense. Which is why we always strive to make the solution more user-friendly and less requiring of manual intervention.

The solution is in line with Proximus’ vision of paperless, digital processes, as well as the evolution of its own service offering towards more digital services. The integration of OCR technology frees up valuable time for employees, both travellers and approvers, allowing them to focus on higher added value tasks.

Data is automatically extracted and pre-controlled, meaning approvers and controllers check expenses only when needed rather than doing so systematically.

Our sampling offering was implemented in order to further decrease the need to control expenses. With sampling, rules are put in place to automatically select a certain number or proportion of expenses for manual verification. This keeps the control requirements in line with the company’s policies and the available controllers.