Recruitment Giant outsources expense management process to Globalexpense

Meridian Business Support - one of the UKís largest privately owned recruitment companies ñ has announced it has outsourced its expense management process to GlobalExpense ñ one of Europeís largest payers of employee expenses. The news reflects continued developments in Meridianís web-based strategy for providing efficiencies through technological solutions.

The outsourced web based system will be accessible to all 275 employees who work in 37 different offices from Glasgow to Brighton. Many of the executives travel regularly to client premises including construction sites and industrial warehouses and attend in house training courses. Now all staff will be able to submit expense claims, any time, anywhere and be paid the next day to an account of their choice.

Jeanette Barrowcliffe, Financial Director, Meridian Business Support comments:

ìWhen I joined the company eight years ago, the company relied upon a 100% paper based system for its 100 employees. Since then the company has tripled in size, its annual expense expenditure has risen to 250K and the processing of claims took two full weeks a month of an executiveís time. So we decided to review our processes and consider more efficient ways of managing time and ensure there was greater transparency with our expense spend.

ìI read about GlobalExpenseís service in the trade magazine Accountancy Age and discovered that it would enable all aspects of the complex back-office process to be outsourced (including all regulatory compliance, document storage and repayments to employees). It also allows management to receive highly detailed management information breaking down employee expenses incurred.î

GlobalExpense handles the often complex tax and VAT regulation as well as continually evolving thereby ensuring that at any stage we are fully compliant.

David Vine of GlobalExpense said: ìTypically employee expenses are a businessís second largest controllable expense. Because of the complexities of tax regulations, if employees donít enter the right details then it can be very expensive correcting things at a later stage ñ and even more expensive if the VAT isnít reclaimed.î

David Vine added: ìBusinesses also typically have little time to analyse what expenses are being incurred and who is over-claiming or breaking company policy because of the cost and difficulty of coding and retrieving the data ñ this is all automatically done by GlobalExpense resulting in real-time analysis capabilities.î

Concludes Jeanette: ìThe culture of the way people work is changing and increasingly I think other large companies in the recruitment industry will look to outsource some of their financial and human capital processes. Using GlobalExpense has provided us with an extra eight-days per month of executive time which can now be deployed on other aspects of the business. Weíre very happy to have simplified our processes.î