That Ancient, Mystical Thing Called a Handshake

Here at Certify, we have worked hard to document our company values and boil them down into a meaningful acronym: CPR SERVICE. Our number one company value (and hence the first letter of CPR SERVICE) is the letter C which stands for Customers.

Let’s talk about a company’s first customer and how that works. The company begins to offer a product and a prospective customer sees real value and is willing to pay some amount of real dollars to get it. The entrepreneurial soul recognizes this, does a quick calculation and says, “The price for this product is ten dollars.” The customer thinks for a moment about the effort and cost they would have to expend to acquire the product some other way, and then responds, “It’s a deal,” and hands over the money. Though today it may be an over-used cliché, in Western cultures this exchange has traditionally been sealed with a handshake.

There is something almost magical, perhaps mystical, about that handshake. The buyer and seller are making a pact; they are marking a moment in which they have a shared understanding and intent. They could stop and write it all down, and today, that is exactly what happens in modern business. But a written contract is only a way of formalizing and recording the intents of the buyer and seller at the moment that the handshake takes place.

The handshake is not a universal tradition here on planet Earth, but in many cultures and for thousands of years it has allowed two people to quickly form a social connection on a deeper level than with words alone. When used for the purpose of sealing a business agreement, it seems that Depeche Mode had it right – “The handshake seals the contract / from the contract there’s no turning back.” No turning back? Really?? Yes, basically. Any amount of turning back causes both parties to reflect upon that handshake with some level of regret. When that happens, both the buyer and seller think to themselves, “Well, I guess I know that person’s word is not trustworthy. No more shaking hands with him!”

But of course, there are many more situations in which a buyer and seller perform their agreed-upon duties. The seller delivers the product with the proper quality and timeliness, and the buyer delivers the agreed-upon payment. From that point on, the possibility exists that the buyer will experience that sometimes-elusive feeling of customer satisfaction, rather than buyer’s remorse. If the buyer is satisfied, it usually opens up opportunities for additional handshake transactions with other buyers, and now the seller has what we commonly call a startup business. The person doing the selling is now a founder.

This much is easy, but what if there are lots and lots of transactions taking place? If the business grows and sees a large volume of transactions, eventually there are simply too many transactions for the founder to service all alone and employees must be hired. Are buyers going to shake hands with every employee? Of course not, only with the founder. Whoa, wait a minute, now we have a problem! The employees who are not involved in the actual handshake don’t really know what was going through the minds of the buyer and seller at the time of the handshake. What would happen if the founder did all the handshaking and failed to communicate the spirit of each transaction with all of the employees? The result would be a large business that would have a hard time delivering customer satisfaction. Ever seen one of those?

Improve Expense Reporting With Online Expense Report Software

Expense reporting is an inevitable activity. Employees travel, and when they do so on business purposes, the organization has to reimburse them. This process of reporting and reimbursement can be simple and straight forward or be a tedious task that is riddled with inefficiencies. Unfortunately, today, many organizations still manage their expenses using manual expense management practices. Manual expense reporting can be lengthy, expensive, and inefficient; just a mundane activity like the physical movement of paper requests and reports from one desk to another proves these points. There are a myriad other activities that have to be performed and these can seriously magnify the inefficiencies.

The solution to this inefficiency and the way to make the expense management process simple and straight forward is to deploy online expense report software. As mentioned earlier, there are a number of activities involved in expense management. The traveling employee prepares tentative pre-trip expense reports which have to be approved by a supervisor. Once the employee finishes the trip, post-trip expense claim reports are to be prepared and submitted to the concerned department. These claims then have to be verified and checked for adherence to company travel and expense policy. Once it passes through all these steps, the employee is then reimbursed.

All these activities, when done manually, increase the time taken for processing whereas expense report software significantly decreases the processing time. There is no need for any paper pushing by any employee; the entire process can be carried out online. An online signature software solution can be integrated with the expense management solution to accelerate the process of adding signatures to documents. Users simply sign online on soft copies instead of making wet signatures on paper documents. Another reason expense management is tedious is that the number of stakeholders involved in the process use their own methods and systems. The supervisor might want the pre-trip request in a mail instead of on paper, the accounting team might like a paper report, or the employee might use a different format of reporting than what was initially agreed. In such a scenario, everyone suffers because they now have to duplicate data. Visibility also suffers because of the sheer number of different systems the data has to be collected from. There is no convenient way to create reports either.

With online expense report software, though, there is no scope for this. It is an end to end system which manages all aspects of expense reporting. From the employee to the accounting professional, everyone logs in with their credentials and uses the same system. Be it the routing of the workflow, the formats, the policies of reporting, or the procedures, everything is streamlined. As all the expense management-related activity is confined to one system, there is no issue of lack of visibility either. The software comes with a reporting feature that allows you to make sense of all the data. You can create different reports with a few simple clicks. So, what do you say? Are you ready to shift to expense report software?