Necho Upgrades EMA Solution

Toronto — April 29, 2003 — Necho Systems rolled out the latest version of its employee expense management solution, adding such features as support for shared services operations, enhanced purchasing card support, and improved analytics and reporting capabilities.

Necho said that its Expense 7.0 solution streamlines the range of employee business expense processes from submission to reimbursement while helping companies to control overall spend, ensure compliance with corporate expense policies and achieve process cost reductions.

The solution addresses employee business expenses ranging from fleet, mobile phones, and recruitment and training to petty cash, employee relocation, groups and meeting expenditures, as well as business expenditures charged to a purchasing card.

Version 7.0 offers multi-national and multi-business unit organizations global capabilities that include currency handling, multiple languages, value-added (VAT) and sales tax support, and requirements for benefits-in-kind and mileage legislation. In addition, the solution provides support for shared services operations without compromising localized business rules policy and configuration.

Improvements to purchasing card support include the ability to allocate Level III card data and the ability to manage centrally billed and centrally paid card programs.

The provider said its solution's flexible policy workflow and approval workflow capabilities allow customers to tailor Expense 7.0 to their business requirements, while the software's integration capabilities allow for connecting to such external systems as ledger, payables, payroll, charge card, human resources and others through some 80 native adapters.

Upgrades to the solution's analytics and reporting capabilities are intended to ensure that customers can mine and leverage information for benchmarking, scorecarding and vendor negotiations, the provider said.

Commenting on the new version, Christa Degnan, a research director with technology consultancy Aberdeen Group, said, "With the release of Expense 7.0, Necho is extending the capabilities of its [expense management automation (EMA)] platform to support more strategic spend management initiatives, which Aberdeen research shows is more and more important for EMA vendors to consider in today's cost-conscious climate."

For more information on solutions for travel and expense management, see "Expense Reports Made Inexpensive," the Net Best Thing column in the December 2001 issue of iSource Business.

For further insights from Aberdeen's Degnan into what to look for in an expense management automation solution, see the March 8, 2002, iSourceonline article "Getting More out of EMA."