As a matter of fact, setting up limits is never an easy thing to do. When it comes to money, it's all the more difficult. Travel expenses have a direct impact on your team's working conditions and hence on their commitment. Nevertheless in service provider companies, the impact on your benefits is also crucial. So, let's take a closer look at this topical issue: bill management.

Meal costs: the 'pleasure vs excess' dilemma

First step you should probably take: setting up a snapshot of costs in your company. Drawing up value/volume summary filed by nature and staff member will help you take into account these expenses on an actual ground, not a theoritical one.

Should you set up a ceiling to these expenses, don't do it arbitrarily but start from the average amounts (though keeping in mind that a ceiling is meant to prevent budgetary drifting and not to save money). Hence you will help your firm's social climate to improve.

Here's another acknowledgement born out of good sense observation: you don't spend as much when you're on a mission as on a business lunch with clients, suppliers or partners. Make two clearly different categories, set a ceiling to the first and be more flexible with the latter -being tight as two coats of paint with clients has never proved a rewarding strategy.

Thorough management, clever intervention

VAT is most certainly your first gain control setting. Inputting the VAT amount and rate for each receipt might be tedious, but this small step taken by each staff member every month will cut your budget up to 5%.

Furthermore, tracking should be smart: controlling two thousand consultants means skyrocketting management costs! Tracking would be more efficient by using random samples and systematical checking of the profiles who are more likely to cheat. Let them know about their misuses: be firm yet benevolent.

Simple and quick handling processes

As a service provider, you ought to know that time really is money. Moreover, 17 step workflows as much as end-of- the-month-accountants-overbooking are now out of date. So let's take a leap in the 21st century, still keeping these 4 simple rules in mind.

• No more than two levels of approval are required. Crossing this limit would be overzealous.
• Check and pay expense bills at the end of each month. Mistakes would be scarcier and it would bring a smile on your employees' faces.
• In that regard, invest in an efficient software solution: 80% of the job will hence be done.
• Soon, you will be able to dematerialize expense bills, a quicker and nicer way to work for everybody! (draft law in progress).