Chapter 12. Travel Expense Discovery

The goal of this chapter is to continue our exploration of Qlik Sense with real data, and how it meets the needs of business discovery in your organization. The Qlik Sense application chosen for this chapter is a topic near and dear to most finance departments, Travel Expense Management. Like all the applications covered in this book, feel free to explore this application live at http://sense-demo.qlik.com. With that said, let's turn our attention to the following challenge of travel expense management and how Qlik Sense addresses this common business challenge.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Common travel expense analysis challenges

• The unique way Qlik Sense addresses these challenges

• How the application was built

The business problem

Expenses are a major line item of every global company. Traveling cost is a part of every sales and service cycle. Unfortunately, most expense tools capture the transaction but do little to help gain insights about how the expenses were spent, when, and most importantly how, to reduce these expenses when possible. Some key questions include:

• How are expenses tracked versus the budget?

• What is the actual amount spent to date?

• What is our largest expense type?

• How can we reduce expenses?

Application features

Now, let's take a look at the unique way Qlik Sense approaches solving the business problems mentioned in the previous section. Qlik Sense's associative model allows users to answer common questions through filters, but they can also address the more important follow up questions that arise. As you may recall, this type of analysis uses "The Power of Gray", named after the color Qlik Sense assigns to nonassociated elements (potential opportunities for improvement) highlighted in Chapter 3, Empowering Next Generation Data Discovery Consumers.

The key questions include:

• How are expenses tracked versus the budget?

• What is actual amount spent to date?

• Is my department over budgeted?

• What is our largest expense variance?

• What is the meal expense breakdown?

• How can we reduce expenses?

Before we begin, let's review the main sheets within the Travel Expense Management application. As noted in the following screenshot, the application is made up of three sheets: Dashboard, Airfare, and...

Developing the application

Let's start our review of the heart of a Qlik Sense application, the data model. As you can see from the following screenshot, there are six tables in the Travel Expense Management associative model. At the heart of this application is the Expenses table. These tables were created through Data Load Editor, which was covered in Chapter 5, Authoring Engaging Applications. It is worth noting that Qlik and Qlik partners provide both general-purpose connectors and specialized connectors to access a broad array of data sources.

Examining the key tables

Let's examine the key tables.

Expenses

The Expenses table contains all the key information (shown in the following screenshot) about the expense transaction of an employee. This includes information such as the date, employee name, expense type, and so on.

The Expenses table

PerDiemRates

The PerDiemsRates table contains all the key information (shown in the following screenshot) about state, city, month, rates, and so on:

The...

Summary

In summary, Qlik Sense provides unique capabilities to meet the challenging task of analyzing and managing travel expenses. Without the capabilities offered by Qlik, this task can be difficult due to the size of the data and the many perspectives that can be taken in trying to understand airline purchasing, meal expense habits, and the impact on meeting corporate budget requirements. Qlik's associative indexing engine powers this exploration and means that meeting these requirements is no longer challenging at all.

In the next chapter, we will explore how Qlik Sense meets the needs of demographic data discovery.