DoubleClick

The Problem

• DoubleClick's paper- and labor-intensive travel expense reimbursement processes needed reengineering
• Rapid growth regionally and internationally to include over 1,300 employees*
• Manual T&E expense reporting and reimbursement process was becoming more costly, time-consuming and inefficient

The Solution

• Web-based Concur Expense solution allows employees and managers to easily file T&E expense reports
• Solution also allows for tracking the approval and reimbursement processes from their desktops via any Web browser

The Benefits

• Concur Expense has dramatically reduced the amount of time DoubleClick employees spend creating, tracking, and managing T&E expense reports
• Streamlined expense management workflow, increased employee productivity, and control over operating costs
• DoubleClick was able to keep its valuable R&D and IT resources focused on its core business, rather than distracting them with a travel expense reimbursement management project

  *as of the end of 1999

At most companies, the worst part of business travel isn't waiting in line at the airport or fighting for a cab to the hotel. It's filling out the expense report and then waiting to be reimbursed.

Thanks to Concur Expense, a Web-based travel and entertainment (T&E) expense management solution from Concur Technologies, DoubleClick's employees are filing their expense reports easily and receiving their travel expense reimbursements quickly. The back end management of these reports and payroll reimbursements is more efficient and accurate, reducing DoubleClick's cost of T&E processing and administration.

Growing Pains
DoubleClick's core business of delivering advertisements on the Web has seen tremendous growth in the last three years, with revenues increasing at up to 200 percent a year. In the fourth quarter of 1999, DoubleClick acquired three companies to complement its existing business and expand into new markets, swelling its workforce to over 1,300 employees worldwide. And by the end of 2000, DoubleClick expects to add another 1,000 employees to its payroll. Approximately forty percent of the company's employees are in sales, a job involving significant amounts of travel, which placed a huge burden on corporate T&E processing and administration.

Manual and Cumbersome
DoubleClick's travel expense reimbursement and reporting process was manual, costly, and time-consuming. Employees recorded their expenses on an Excel spreadsheet template and used printed hard copies to collect their manager's signature for approval. The expense reports and receipts were sent to the accounting department for review and final approval before checks were issued. Employees in regional offices mailed the approved expense reports and receipts to the corporate accounting office in New York. The turnaround time from creating an expense report to receiving the reimbursement check was at least three to five weeks.

"Being a technology company, we strongly wanted a streamlined, paperless, and efficient T&E expense reporting solution," says Gary Faucher, MIS Manager at DoubleClick. "We also quickly realized that we did not want to tie up our valuable resources in creating, implementing and maintaining an expense reporting application."

Best of Both Worlds
To meet its trravel expense reimbursement and reporting needs, DoubleClick selected Concur Expense. "The combination of technologies and services we got from Concur, Microsoft, and Exodus, who delivers the outsourced hosting services, was a great fit for our needs," says Stephen Collins, DoubleClick's Chief Financial Officer. "With Concur Expense we get a secure, scalable, reliable system that helps us meet our business objectives but doesn't require a large investment of IT resources."

Thanks to Concur Expense, DoubleClick business travelers can now easily enter, approve, and track T&E expense reports through a password protected Web site. Employees receive automatic email updates at each step of the approval process, and a final notification when the claim is paid.

"The Web interface is intuitive and easy to use. We can access it from anywhere on the Internet, at any time," says Faucher. "Everyone is thrilled with how quickly we now receive our reimbursement checks."

Moreover, DoubleClick's accounting office is more productive, as Concur Expense automatically creates reports that can be imported into the payroll system used to pay employees. "The operating costs of our back end internal and approval process is reduced and controlled," says Faucher. "The Concur solution helped drive operational improvements."

The flexibility and scalability mean that Concur Expense can be set up to handle small companies with a few hundred users, or large companies with thousands of employees.

Savings Everywhere
"We were impressed with the speed and ease of configuration and deployment. This was a "zero cost" and "zero training" deployment," says Faucher. "We totally eliminated in-house development and implementation costs by purchasing the solution from Concur. By deploying Concur's Web-based, hosted solution we never distracted our IT group from running our core business."

"Senior management certainly believe in what we are doing with the system," states Faucher. "They see the inherent value of our approach, and easily recognize the obvious cost savings of moving to an expense system like Concur's."