Ricoh Printing Solutions: Expenses processing with a regional financial hub

Introduction
Ricoh Printing Solutions Europe, headquartered in Dublin, was formed by combining the resources of three printer-related companies of the Ricoh Group, manufacturer of the world's first desktop colour laser printer.

European sales and technical support team
The sales and technical support team of Ricoh Printing Solutions Europe is located in France, Germany and the UK. The accounts function, however, is based at the European Headquarters in Dublin, which co-ordinates all the expenses for Europe.

When Ricoh centralised the accounts function in Dublin, rather than having it in separate financial centres across Europe, the company found trying to deal with expenses sent in manually by the different offices both cumbersome and time consuming. They decided to look for a way to reduce the amount of paper that was sent between the Dublin accounting hub to the other European offices. The WebExpenses system was selected and was installed towards the end of 2001.

Tangible and measurable cost savings
Emott Walsh, Financial Accountant at Ricoh commented:

"Prior to installation of the system we found that people were not submitting their expenses regularly, but they send them all at once and expect to get paid the next day. We set up a system using Access, but it was very slow, and not user friendly and this delayed the submission of expenses."

Employees found the WebExpenses system easy-to-use and required little training. The package has both speeded up and simplified the expenses system at Ricoh Europe.

"Previously, filing paper reports and calculating expenses took up a lot of time. Waiting for pieces of paper to arrive in the post and having to chase people by phone, especially in a foreign language, was very inefficient compared to receiving and approving expense reports  online. Before, we were just guessing at what expenses had been accrued in a given month. Users like it too - the only complaints we’ve had is that sometimes the Internet is very slow!"

Because they want to be able to enter their expenses from wherever they are (often from home or while travelling on business, rather from their workplace), many Ricoh employees use WebExpenses' offline version to process their expenses.

"Because the system is so easy to use, employees now submit their expenses on a weekly or monthly basis. As a result, the company’s accounts are far more accurate and up to date, as the finance department can see at a glance what expenses have been claimed in a given month."

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