Groupize, the meeting and event management platform, announced the launch of new functionality to centralize and streamline all expenses and payments around events. Traditionally, according to the announcement, the spend for meetings, events, team management and projects can represent as much as 68% of travel and entertainment in a corporation without any expense automation. In addition, the information resides in various departments or systems without aggregated views of the entire spend. Groupize’s new functionality captures spending from multiple sources. For example, fixed costs for meeting space and food and beverage on a hotel invoice are automatically combined with air and car spend in SAP Concur Travel along with the room block consumption to create a consolidated view of the total cost. Charles de Gaspe Beaubien, chief customer officer, said the “holy grail” for procurement and expense managers is to capture and streamline payment processes around a large portion of invisible and manual spend. He said Groupize listened to the demands of its largest customer, which spends upwards of $50 million annually on projects and needed automated spend visibility and reconciliation across hundreds of events. Their reconciling processes for virtual card payments was unmanageable using spreadsheets, he said, “so we stepped in to solve the problem.”