Aims to help midsize organizations reduce costs, fraudulent disbursements by improving expense reporting, reimbursement process.
Bellevue, WA — December 8, 2003 — Solution provider Fidesic today launched its Web-based expense management automation (EMA) service, designed to help midsize organizations monitor and control spending, reduce fraud, recover billable expenses and increase supplier discounts and rebates.
The new service, dubbed Fidesic Expense, was developed by Seattle-based Onrain, an expense management automation software company, whose acquisition Fidesic also announced today.
Fidesic Expense offers tools for management and finance staff to monitor and control how employees are spending company dollars. Fidesic said that Expense is designed to respond to the specific and unique expense reporting needs of buyers, executives, spenders, approvers and auditors.
According to the 2002 Report to the Nation published by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, fraud costs companies an estimated $70 billion a year and 22 percent of all fraudulent disbursements are from employee expense reporting schemes.
The majority of midsize organizations are currently using paper or spreadsheet methods for expense reporting. By automating these processes, chief financial officers can move toward implementing effective spending controls, reducing fraud and gaining timely access to data for financial reporting, initiating more effective supplier negotiations.
The Expense solution automates internal controls, helping companies to control spending, increase fraud detection and controls, Fidesic says. "Fidesic Expense transforms the business critical expense reporting process from a paper-based, resource-draining effort to an automated business process," said Fidesic CEO Jon Matsuo.
Additionally, the solution provider said that Expense can help:
- Boost regulatory compliance: Expense gives early visibility to accrued but unrecorded expenditures while capturing relevant details for any expense type, ensuring that expenses are properly documented to meet IRS record keeping standards and requirements, according to the solution provider.
- Increase supplier discounts and rebates and reduce indirect spending: Fidesic said that Expense can flag the use of non-preferred or approved suppliers and monitor what suppliers are charging in every instance, ensuring ongoing contract compliance and optimal pricing.
- Recover billable expenses: Expense collects the expense details and the billing allocations, and the solution can transfer this data to an organization's invoicing system, helping to ensure that recoverable expenses are, in fact, collected cash.
- Make better spend management decisions: Using Expense, executives and managers can drill down into spending activity by department, individual and the type of expenditure to better understand spending requirements and how to meet those needs most cost-effectively, Fidesic said.
Available today, Expense integrates with various accounting systems to provide automated, real-time management of the expense reporting process, the solution provider said. Expense is a service delivered over the Web and can be activated in only a few hours with no software to download.
In announcing the acquisition of Onrain, Fidesic said that Onrain co-founder and CEO Cher Paige had joined the Fidesic team as vice president of marketing.
"Acquiring Onrain strengthens Fidesic's opportunity to address urgent business issues among mid-market CFO's, and the expertise of Onrain's team is a natural fit for Fidesic's growth in the $5.7 billion payables and $4.1 billion expense management markets," said Fidesic CEO Jon Matsuo.
Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
