Ellucian, the leading provider of higher education software and services, today announced the introduction of a new cloud-based solution, Ellucian Travel and Expense Management powered by Chrome River.

According to a report by the Aberdeen Group, Best In Class organizations are 56% more likely to utilize end-to-end expense management solutions, which help institutions develop real-time visibility into significant aspects of T&E expense management, such as spending against budget and pre-trip travel information.

Ellucian Travel and Expense Management eliminates the manual, error-prone processing of expense reports, easing the burden on faculty and staff and freeing up finance resources to spend more time ensuring compliance and providing better service. Additionally, it increases visibility for finance staff into travel and expense spending, travel frequency, and supplier costs to better manage expenses and negotiate better discounts.

“Together with Chrome River, we’re helping colleges and universities become more efficient and more effective,” said Jeff Ray, president and CEO at Ellucian. “Ellucian Travel and Expense Management provides a modern, cloud-based user experience that will ease the expense reporting process, while still meeting the unique needs of higher education.”

Ellucian Travel and Expense Management is a global solution that allows configurations to support differing requirements for items such as pre-trip authorizations, encumbrances, delegate access, per diems, tax recovery, fringe benefit taxes, car use reimbursements and cash advances. The solution is used in more than 90 countries and supports multiple languages and a wide range of integrations with travel and financial institutions.

“By partnering with Ellucian, Chrome River is able to offer higher education institutions a level of integration and simplicity of implementation that was never possible before,” said Alan Rich, CEO of Chrome River. “The combination of Chrome River's powerful and agile solution with Ellucian's depth of experience and functionality makes for a very compelling solution for higher education expense management needs. By combining the innovations and experience of our two organizations, we will be able to offer exciting developments in mobile capabilities, analytics and other functionality crucial to our joint customers.”