How Janney Modernized T&E Operations Across 100+ Offices

The Challenge

Janney had a lengthy, manually driven expense management process. After an employee manually completed an Excel spreadsheet with line-item expenses, it was routed for approval to one or more people. The routing process was to drop the sheet on the approver’s desk and send the approved expense report via inter-office mail to the accounts payable (AP) headquarters. AP was responsible for auditing the reports for accuracy, duplicate entries, compliance, approvals, and GL/cost center allocations. It was only after AP received the reports that they could be tracked.

The invoice workflow was just as manual and time-consuming. Invoices were mailed directly to headquarters or sent to one of the 108 satellite branch managers. The invoices were manually approved and sent to AP via inter-office mail for processing. Processing included scanning and entry into the Microsoft Dynamics financial system. Many times, AP needed to send the invoice to another department for approval. Invoices weren’t tracked, so there was no transparency as to what was ‘out for approval,’ making month-end quite challenging.

The Implementation

Janney had an aggressive timeline for implementing Emburse Expense Enterprise and Emburse Invoice Enterprise. The top priority was to customize Emburse Expense Enterprise to make it intuitive and easy to use by customizing buttons, creating default matter/project allocations for expenses, and adding compliance and approval routing rules.

After the implementation phase, Emburse Invoice Enterprise was rolled out first. The AP team was trained on how to create invoices. Managers and members of the AP team who were designated as ‘approvers’ were trained on how to approve/return invoices via email. After Emburse Invoice Enterprise went live, Emburse Expense Enterprise was rolled out to two pilot groups—the IT department and the finance department. Emburse Expense Enterprise was then rolled out to corporate services and legal groups.

Once the implementation team was satisfied, they began training the branches. Training was accomplished through webinars, during which the AP Manager and Director of Finance outlined the entire expense process in detail. Additional instructional videos were also created to cover the main functionality of Emburse Expense Enterprise.

The Results

The transition from spreadsheets to a fully automated cloud-based solution addressed the issues that Janney wanted to resolve. With a paperless and centralized AP process, everything is sent directly to a centralized email that the AP staff can access. Expense reports and invoices can be tracked throughout the workflow process, providing more transparency for the employees and AP.

With automated compliance and approval routing workflows through the business rules engine, out-of-compliance expenses are flagged, and others continue through the approval routing process without holding up the entire expense report. Enforcing compliance upfront makes the auditing process much quicker and simpler. Expense reports are processed much faster and team members are reimbursed more quickly—making happier employees.

Before automating workflows, weeks would go by before an invoice was approved and forwarded to AP for payment. With Emburse Invoice Enterprise, invoices are automatically forwarded to the business owner much quicker, and tracking is available throughout the entire workflow process.

Why Emburse Enterprise?

• Abandon Excel-based sheets
• Eliminate manual entry into Microsoft Dynamics
• Eliminate manual auditing
• Implement a centralized workflow solution for expenses and invoices
• Enforce compliance with company policies
• Automate/speed up approval routing
• Provide transparency throughout the entire workflow process
• Reimburse employees faster