With so many payment methods, it can sometimes be overwhelming trying to manage monthly expenses. The problem gets compounded for business and corporate account holders that have large volumes of expenditures to go through, with national and international payment systems.

In order to simplify expense management, MasterCard (News - Alert) has implemented more features to its Smart Data platform for commercial expense management and analytics products.

The Smart Data platform is designed for a company using one card, or a global organization with multiple general ledger tables and complex hierarchies. The new features comprise mobile innovations and other enhancements.

The Mobile Receipt Capture Application is designed to work on Android, BlackBerry (News - Alert) and iOS platforms to give corporate cardholders the ability to upload receipts by taking pictures with a smartphone or mobile device, and attaching it to an expense report. Another mobile feature is the Mobile Fleet e-Receipt App, for businesses that require accurate and real-time automotive fleet management.

By entering the required data from their fleet managers, such as the amount of fuel, the price paid for the purchase, odometer reading and the name of the merchant, organizations will be able to implement numerous cost saving measures.

Using mobile devices instead of paper saves organizations a substantial amount of money. Studies have revealed using automated expense tools without paper to process reports cuts the time required to execute these tasks by more than 50 percent.

This translates to a significant amount of man hours for large organizations, yielding a more effective use of company staff.

Additional improvements have been put in place for User-Defined Exports (UDE), comprising a new self-service feature designed to give the issuer a way to configure new spending reports. By allowing the issuer to perform this service instead of ordering a custom-build report from MasterCard, they are able to save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Just as well, customers can use the new analytics capability to get detailed reports with charts and graphs on the screen to view past expenditures. It can consolidate spending across different divisions and locations of an organization, as well as the different type of card programs issued to employees.

The transactions from all these sources, including multiple currencies, can be accessed and displayed in a single view.