JCDecaux is Europe’s leading outdoor advertising specialist. The organisation has a significant number of field-based staff in sales, engineering and support roles, so had long suffered the frustrations of the conventional paper-based expenses process.

Bespoke software functionality

While the benefits of moving to a software solution were apparent, it became apparent on a closer examination of requirements that there was a need for some bespoke functionality. As a result, the following features were developed by WebExpenses to JCDecaux specifications:

• An employee can be assigned to a car registration number, a car registration number to an engine capacity grouping and in turn, an engine capacity grouping to a particular mileage rate. In effect, the rate at which an employee is reimbursed mileage is determined by which car they drove in the period in question.
• Additional database fields were created to store information to ease the process by which payments are made to reimburse employees.
• The interface to Sage 500, which is built around a Sage 500 API, was configured to JCDecaux requirements, to ensure that data is posted quickly and accurately to the appropriate ledgers within Sage 500.

Raj Rajkumar, Financial Systems Manager at JCDecaux, commented as follows:

"With a large number of expense claimants across the UK, expense claims has always been a complex process for us.  An automated electronic expense solution had always been in our Information Systems wish list.  We chose WebExpenses primarily for three reasons:

1. System customisation to fulfil our requirements
2. Sage 500 integration
3. Ease of use and simplicity

Since introducing WebExpenses, we’ve been receiving very positive feedback from the users."