For years, meeting professionals have promoted how important it is to get on the radar screens of C-level executives. To get their buy-in on strategic meetings management. To win a seat at the table.

The good news is that more and more CFOs get it: Because of higher meeting costs, Sarbanes-Oxley, new data-tracking and reporting technologies, and other reasons, many CFOs now see meeting spend as an area that is ready for expense management.

John Adair, CFO at Redmond, Wash.-based Concur, is the perfect example. While meeting planning is currently a decentralized function at Concur, Adair is actively involved in tracking and monitoring meeting spend. The company uses its own expense-management software, Concur Meeting, to capture data on all meetings planned companywide, and Adair receives reports on everything from the number of meetings being planned to attendee registration and total meeting spend.

Concur is in the business of expense management, so you might think that Adair is more aware of meetings than most — but he disagrees. “Over the past three to four years, meetings have gotten more and more attention [from C-level execs]. I think I am probably a typical CFO. I get reporting on all meetings of any size. We set up specific budgets for meetings and monitor spend against those budgets. We do real-time reporting and see how the travel component of a meeting is running against the budget.”

A survey of Corporate Meetings & Incentives' readers confirms that: One in four planners reports that their CFOs' involvement in meeting management has grown over the past 12 months. Thirty-seven percent say that their CFOs are involved in approving meeting spending, and 27 percent say that their CFOs have some involvement in both setting meeting policy and site-related decisions. And this, readers say, will only grow.

What Gets Measured?

All of this is good news for planners who, instead of viewing C-level oversight as Big Brother, see this increased interest from top management as an opportunity to grow their strategic roles and gain support for their departments' initiatives.

Pamela Ferranti, manager, meeting management solutions, Xerox Corp., Webster, N.Y., is one example. Ever since the company took a cue from its corporate travel department and developed a centralized meeting-management solutions department in 2004, her department has had the buy-in of her CFO.

And as the strategic meeting management program at Xerox continues to mature (Ferranti and her team are working to expand the program globally), she now reports monthly to senior management on such metrics as number of meetings going through their department, number of attendees per meeting, projected meeting spend, and cost per attendee.

Ferranti is evaluated on how her division contributes not only to savings and cost avoidance, but also to top-line growth. “Some people might think that an organization like ours that provides an internal service would not contribute to revenue generation, but it's absolutely the opposite,” she says. “We're responsible for feeding data from customer events into our sales database. From there, the sales force has the ability to see which customers attended Xerox events and then have intelligent conversations with them as a result.”

She communicates results such as these to the company's senior officers through a monthly management letter, and reports on savings initiatives, such as integrating air-booking software from GetThere into StarCite's attendee registration platform, which resulted in a reduction of air-ticket fulfillment fees by 75 percent. An incredible 98 percent of the company's meetings are now booked through her department, which helped to achieve a savings of 40 percent on meeting expenses in 2007.

How Much Should CFOs Care?

According to a recent study by Boston-based research firm The Aberdeen Group, meetings represent a multimillion-dollar category of spend that, on average, is equal to 2.8 percent of a company's revenue. While these numbers — and efforts such as Ferranti's — should demand the attention of the finance department, the question is how much attention?

CFOs who do not have any meetings oversight are likely missing a huge opportunity to control costs, says Kari Knoll Kesler, global manager, Honeywell meeting solutions, St. Louis Park, Minn. “The number of meetings that companies think they plan and the number they actually plan are usually drastically different. In my experience, companies typically spend three times more on meetings than they estimate.”

Kesler, who was hired at Honeywell to initiate a SMMP, has the huge task of “making sure we are making the right decisions about the company's $66 million annual investment in meetings and events.” That means the 5,000 events that planners at Honeywell execute each year must all go through her department, which resides in procurement and reports to finance.