Original Date: 09/14/1998
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

The Electronic Expense Report is an on-line travel expense reporting system developed by Raytheon Missile Systems Company (RMSC) for its field engineers. Field engineers electronically fill out their travel costs and labor charges on a daily basis. The reporting system takes these entries, and automatically calculates and distributes the expenses to the applicable program’s cost account number. The process minimizes errors and reduces turnaround time for processing travel claims.

More than 400 suppliers throughout the United States provide parts and materials for RMSC’s missile programs. The company uses 17 field engineers to interact with these suppliers. Each field engineer is required to submit weekly expense reports of their travels, as well as operating supply costs for reimbursement and billing to the appropriate support programs. In the past, field engineers manually made entries and calculations on paper forms, and mailed these to the Travel Office for processing. The Travel Office would match the forms against the field engineers’ timecards to calculate the proper distribution of these charges to the corresponding programs. This process was time consuming, error prone, and often inconsistent with the distribution of charges, thus increasing processing time and delaying reimbursement to the field engineers.

In March 1998, RMSC replaced the paper forms with the Electronic Expense Report, created via Excel spreadsheets. Field engineers can directly enter their charge numbers and hours, as written on their timecards, into the Electronic Expense Report. The system calculates the amount of labor hours for the week, and distributes the expenses to the applicable program’s cost account number. These same percentages are also used to automatically calculate and distribute the field engineers’ per diem expenses. The Electronic Expense Report looks similar to the paper version, but now the calculations are done automatically, uniformly, and in an easily accessible manner for the Finance department.

The new on-line forms are simpler, and enable the field engineers to fill them out faster. The need to calculate the distribution of expenses on an individual basis has been eliminated. The Finance department now spends less hours per week correcting and rejecting expense reports. Since implementing the on-line system, RMSC eliminated printing costs and streamlined its auditing process. New versions or upgrades of the electronic report can be immediately and consistently implemented by all field engineers. The new system’s success has generated an interest in expanding the Electronic Expense Report to other parts of the company.

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