Businesses should track their employees’ expenses to reduce spending and improve productivity. Employees often travel to promote the company’s products and services, spending their own money and time for business purposes.
The accounts team needs to verify the expense reports against receipts and reimburse the employees’ expense claims to enhance their experience. With only a handful of employees, start-ups and SMEs tend to manage their expenses with traditional, paper-based processes. But, when the organization grows, managing the employees and their expenses is difficult. The manual processes cost more than expensive software when you consider the hidden costs associated with paper-based processes.
Here we have discussed how automated expense management processes help you eliminate the hidden costs of the expense management process and provides a seamless experience.
Loss in Productivity and Efficiency
The traditional means of expense management makes the entire process cumbersome for both finance teams and employees. Employees are required to collect, store, and compile all their expenses manually and submit to the managers for approval. Plus, the variables such as multi-state expenses, policies, and currencies make the process even more complicated.
Once the employees submit expense reports, approvers are required to check and validate the claims and process payment manually. Deadlines, policy violations, late submissions, lost receipts, and back and forths with employees consume most of their valuable time. This process takes hours of productive time, affecting the growth of the company.
Loss of Money Over Claimed Expenses
Majority of employees’ speed-up their expense report submission process to complete the entire process within deadlines, even if it means losing their money. While trying to wrap up the work to meet deadlines, employees may often make data entry errors. There may be a few employees who use it as an opportunity to make a few bucks.
The manual data entry errors and fraudulent behaviour in expense report submission and claiming process may seem like a small problem. Still, it can become a critical roadblock to the company’s growth. Finance and accounting teams need to take creative measures to overcome such behaviour.
Hours Spent in Expense Reporting
Businesses waste most of their productive time managing expense reports, shuffling through hoards of physical documentation, dealing with policy violations hovering over multiple applications, and more.
Manually entering the data into the system and verifying claimed spending can be a daunting task for both approvers and employees. It requires patience, human resources, and hours of huddling around. Finance teams spend most of their time looking through the expense report submission process, validating claims, and many other back and forths to check policy violations.
With an expense management solution, finance teams would require to spend less than half the time they spend while managing processes with manual processes. The software allows employees to capture the expense reports with a smartphone, and it automatically extracts the crucial data with OCR technology.
This extracted data will be stored on a cloud-platform along with the electronic form of expense reports, allowing employees to generate and submit expense reports quickly. The software automatically notifies employees and the approvers if any inconsistency or policy violation is recorded in the process.
Processing Costs
As per the PayStream Advisors, businesses spend more than $20 (approx.) to process one expense report. This price will add up to big money if you multiply the amount with the number of employees you have with the expenses filed every month. The businesses that have automated their expense management processes spend less than half this amount to process expense reports. Expense software does all the expense reporting, validating, and documenting work for your employees; at just half, the price seems like a viable route.
The Conclusion
Managing employees’ expenses and keeping track of every detail of the reports can be difficult with the manual processes. The expense management software like SutiExpense documents every single communication made during the expense report filing under one dashboard, providing administrators and employees with a complete audit trail.
With the automation software and its associated features like real-time policy checks and automated data extraction, there is no scope for human errors. There is always a probability of human bias and fraudulent expense claims when it comes to manual data validation. However, with automation, you can eliminate these frauds. Be it a data entry or validation of claimed expenses; everything can be done with just a few clicks.
