Rick Rodick, senior vice president of field finance at Miami-based Ryder Systems, remembers what a pain it was to keep up with his travel and entertainment (T&E) reports back when he spent 50% to 60% of his time on the road. "Keeping track of receipts and filling out manual T&Es was very difficult and time-consuming," he says.

So when Ryder was considering adopting expense management automation software, which constantly updates expense reports as employees use their corporate credit cards, Rodick realized that the benefit of this investment would not be simply its ability to lower administrative costs, but in its capacity to raise employee morale. "The biggest plus is employee satisfaction," he says. "This is just one less hassle that a traveler has now."

Not surprisingly, Rodick turned out to be right about Ryder's implementation of IBM's Expense Reporting Solutions (ERS) last December. Rather than laboring to put together an expense report based on a collection of rumpled paper receipts, employees can simply go online and call up a report that already lists all of their corporate card transactions. The employees need only fill in a few details–such as the business purpose of an expenditure or any cash outlays–and hit a button to send the report on to be approved by a supervisor.