ASDA saves 200,000 by outsourcing its expense management to GlobalExpense

ASDA has chosen to appoint GlobalExpense to manage its employee expense process.

Approximately 2,500 colleagues that claim expenses on a monthly basis will be able to use the service: mainly store managers from across the UK and head office colleagues based at Asda House in Leeds and George House in Leicestershire.

Mike Hazelgrave, Asda Reward Manager, said: ìWe estimate that we will save approximately 200,000 a year by using GlobalExpense's employee expense management process.

The contract was signed in March 2007, but GlobalExpense has worked with ASDA since October 2006 on a pilot scheme. The GlobalExpense system was rolled-out in March 2007, first to colleagues in ASDA House and George House, and will be rolled out to all store based colleagues by end of August.

ìWe were still 100 per cent paper based when it came to colleague expense management,î said Mike Hazelgrave. ìColleagues were unhappy with the manual system especially colleagues who travel extensively overseas.

ìBefore GlobalExpense, we processed colleague expenses via the payroll function and claims were reimbursed with colleaguesí salaries. Colleagues sometimes had to wait up to five or six weeks before being reimbursed. Being a global company, colleagues that travel regularly are often out of the country for between six to eight weeks and for them, the delay between making a claim and receiving payment was often much longer. Now colleagues can claim expenses online, anytime, anywhere and be reimbursed directly into their bank account within a week.

ìThe new system allows our audit team to track more easily whatís been claimed for, check it against the company policy and even change the policy if they see that it is unrealistic or leading to waste.î



David Vine, Managing Director of GlobalExpense, said: ìThe GlobalExpense Employee Expense Benchmark Report 2007 shows that at least 15 per cent of all expense claims are outside of company policy but that 99 per cent of claims are approved. Thatís a lot of out-of-policy claims that get reimbursed and represents a lot of lost profit.

Increasingly retailers are looking for a complete end-to-end expense management based system rather than just a software expense package. Businesses 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 - this is all automatically done by GlobalExpense resulting in real-time analysis capabilities.î