Coupa Expense Management’s Frugal Meter Adds That Little Something Extra to Encourage a Cost-Conscious Corporate Culture

Coupa's patent-pending Frugal Meter recognizes when employees are being frugal, and when they're not!

Last night I went out with some co-workers. After we dined on yummy Thai, I snapped a photo of my dinner receipt on my phone and emailed it to my Coupa Expense Management receipt Inbox —(Yes, we Coupa employees use Coupa for all our purchasing and expense reporting too)—and then logged on this morning to complete the report. I loved that I didn’t have to save the hard copy of the receipt. The image of the receipt was waiting for me in my Receipt Inbox, ready to be dragged into an expense report. And when I did drag that receipt into the report, *poof* a little “Thanks for being frugal!” note popped up on the screen. It made me laugh out loud in the middle of one of my co-worker’s serious stories, but when I turned to my screen to give him a glimpse of my screen, he smiled too. “Wow,” I told him, “I guess I could’ve had another bottle of wine after all.”

The thing is, I come from an ad agency background where I had to travel all the time, and like most people, I inevitably loathed the expense reporting moment that faced me upon my return home. The system I had to use was so ridiculously unintuitive, it would sometimes take me 3 to 4 hours to submit some of my longer reports. So the ease of use of Coupa’s system was a real relief to me.

The thing is: It doesn’t take much to enable people to do their expenses if you make the experience easy for them.  Coupa Expense Management is both easy to use and very powerful. The Frugal Meter not only gives props to those who are spending less than the norm on their expenses, it also gently warns people who submit expenses that are slightly higher than the average that their expenses “seem a little high”. Business rules keep the process moving, as users will be alerted if they need to upload receipts or provide some kind of justification for a larger expense. It only took me about 2 minutes to submit my meal expenses, and I even got a laugh out of it.

Rob Bernshteyn explains Coupa’s Frugal Meter and intelligent auditing (an auditor’s dream feature) features in the video below. Got any other features you think would be useful in an Expense Management application? Make a comment. Let us know!