Expense Reporting

Expenses management is a necessary process for every company. From small businesses to established corporations, expense management makes sure that companies don’t spend more than they earn.

There are several advantages to making the expense management system more effective, including but is not limited to reducing the time spent by employees filing their expenses, giving better visibility to the management, and maximizing profit.

With employee expenses being the second-highest controllable expense, it’s only natural the businesses would like to make the best out of it. Here are several steps that your company can do to streamlining the expense management experience:

Steps To Streamline Expense Management

Step 1: Automate

The best employees get caught up with deadlines, presentations, and meetings. Even the most well-meaning and capable of employees can make mistakes or even delays. After all, they’re only human.

By integrating existing systems such as enterprise resource planning systems, an automatic population from electronic receipts, and company credit card reconciliation, automating expense management tools can help both employees and employers stay on track with their expense report submissions.

Step 2: File Expenses Digitally

A common way to make sure expenses are submitted accurately is to make the process paperless.

Relying on physical documentation for forms, submissions, and supporting documents opens a host of problems.

From lost papers in transit to receipts not being attached, there are a dozen potential reasons why expense submissions are delayed. With digital submissions, you can be sure that your employees will never have to worry about physical documents ever again.

Step 3: Go Online

After going digital, the next step is to go online. Local digital files still have a tendency to be accidentally deleted or stored on devices that can be broken or stolen. To avoid this, companies can set up their expense management software to be accessible online.

With more and more employees working remotely, many companies are leading teams that spend the majority of their time outside the office. Going online also makes expense report filing a lot easier for employees who don’t have the time to go to your office to submit them.

Step 4: Go Mobile

It is not enough to be online. These days, you also have to be mobile. While employees regularly laptops and desktop computers, they don’t always have them on hand. Creating a mobile version of your expenses management software helps employees file expenses while they’re on the go.

Conclusion

No matter what size, companies who do not invest in creating better expense management procedures will have to shoulder additional expenses. From the cost of employee wages or the penalties incurred from delayed or wrong filing, there’s definitely a lot to lose.

Whether it is right after a meal with a client or just when they check out of their hotel, employees can have quickly and easily filed an expense. Streamlining your expense management system makes submissions more accurate, but also more up-to-date. With this, companies will know exactly how much they’re spending, even before employees request for reimbursement.