Nobody likes pushing paper.
Not the salespeople submitting expenses, the managers approving them or the accounts-payable staff verifying that the expenses are, indeed, legitimate. In addition to the time spent preparing expense reports for reimbursement, there's the time spent waiting to get reimbursed. At Yentis' urging, last July a pilot group at TPN began working with Concur Technologies, an ASP based in Redmond, Wash., that helps companies manage expenses. Before long, TPN's 140 employees had dropped out of the expense-reimbursement paper chase and left much of the work to Concur. It was a piece of cake to do it.