Managing receipts to ensure your team is audit ready

Getting audit-ready with effective receipt management

Paper receipts from business travellers are one of the biggest hindrances that any finance or accounting team can face. The receipts are hard to track, manage, and retrieve when needed, making it one of the main reasons why companies struggle to become audit-ready on time.

 It is worth mentioning that failing to produce the relevant receipts during tax audits can land the company in serious trouble. In addition, it can further signal to investors and regulatory bodies that your company has something to hide.

To avoid these hassles, companies need to use an expense management solution, like ExpenseOut, with advanced receipt management capabilities that you need to be audit-ready at all times. 

Here, we look at why this is the case, given the shortcomings of traditional methods of receipt management. 

How traditional receipt management hinders audit readiness

Paper receipts are notoriously easy to misplace, manipulate, or even duplicate. This poses a severe threat to both the finance team and the employees. For the employees, poor receipt management means delayed reimbursements. On the other hand, the finance team runs the risk of not being audit ready when they most need to. 

Most of these challenges are due to the disadvantages of the traditional means of receipt management, which are: 

  • Inability to keep track of the countless paper receipts in circulation
  • Inability to retrieve receipts as and when needed due to the sheer volume 
  • The ease with which paper receipts can be lost or tampered with

ExpenseOut to the rescue: How the cloud-based, automated expense management solution can help companies stay audit-ready all through the year 

Speed up expense reporting like never before 

Usually, expense reporting involves the employees filling out spreadsheets, elaborate forms, or emailing the finance team screenshots of paper receipts. 

ExpenseOut puts an end to all this: the moment an employee makes an expense, they can scan the receipt using OCR and have it automatically uploaded to the cloud. Instantly, the manager or admin is notified of the expense, and the receipt is stored safely on the cloud with all the relevant details that can be used to retrieve it when needed.  

Notably, upon uploading the expense, the system also automatically checks for policy violations, meaning that the approval stage of expense reporting takes no more than a few seconds. 

Seamlessly view and track all your business expenses in one secure location

As your company grows and you have numerous invoices, receipts, and corresponding expense reports, it will become challenging to track everything and retrieve the information you want. 

With the right expense management solution, organizations will maintain all their financial statements and receipts in a unified platform, where the information is safe and easy to reach. 

Further, the company can filter out expenses based on location, department, employee name, expense category, date of spending, etc. Besides, the information can be reviewed/ approved seamlessly in the same window. 

Secure all your receipts with cloud storage 

When employees submit paper receipts to the finance team, it can be a nightmare to verify if they are policy compliant and authentic and store them for reimbursement and expense report generation.

With a solution like ExpenseOut, organizations can hold all their employees’ receipts in a digital vault powered by cloud technology after the employees use the app with OCR functionality to scan the paper receipt. 

This system of storing receipts in ExpenseOut’s unlimited cloud storage is much better because paper receipts can be misfiled, mishandled, or lost. Another great benefit of leveraging cloud technology is that anyone can conveniently access the information they want from the device of choice. 

Conclusion

As you can see, ExpenseOut ensures that the whole process of organizing, managing, viewing, and tracking receipts is pain-free at all levels of the organization. Also, the cloud storage capabilities and automatic report generation in real-time for all the tracked receipts make the solution a must-have that will save your organization tons of resources and time. 

Switch to ExpenseOut today. Reach us at [email protected] for more details. 

Signs your company needs expense management

Clear cut signs your company needs an expense management solution right away

Companies often underestimate how much they need an expense management solution. 

Usually, the realization strikes when they face massive piles of tax documents with unaccounted expenses resulting from years of handling travel and expense (T&E) spending with spreadsheets or legacy software and relying on paper receipts that can be easily duplicated or misplaced.  

Don’t let this happen to your company. Here, we discuss the crucial telltale signs that show you desperately need an expense management solution so that you can take corrective measures right away.

Delays in processing employee reimbursements 

The process of filing an expense, ensuring that it is policy compliant, getting approval, and receiving reimbursements can be quite tedious for employees. If your employees have to find old receipts, struggle with spreadsheets to file their expense reports, and wait for days on end to receive payment, then it is time to consider an expense management solution for automating most of the process. With the right solution, reimbursement requests can be processed in a matter of minutes.

Manually done expense reports (inability to keep up with volume)

Reporting expense manually is something that takes away an employee’s productivity significantly. Collecting old receipts, making sure that they are all in alignment with the company policy, and submitting them via legacy expense management solutions or an email is a recipe for disaster, given that it becomes exceptionally hard to keep track of the paper trail.

Discomfort for the employee is only the beginning of the organization’s troubles; without a streamlined expense management solution that takes all the receipts online and generates reports in real-time, both the management and the finance team must spend hours weeding out duplicate or fake receipts and identifying wasteful and/ or non-compliant expenditure. 

The problem will only get worse as the company grows; even if you can manage expenses manually now, you will soon be buried in a sea of paperwork when you begin auditing. 

Data security concerns

Mistakes in entering or filing expenses, losing receipts, letting non-compliant expenses slip in, etc., are all problems that accompany the use of manual expense management methods. 

If you are facing any of these issues, it might be time to consider an automatic expense management solution that will securely manage your travel and expense data on the cloud and alert you whenever there is any suspicious spending activity. 

You might also need to quickly invest in an expense reporting solution if you are operating in an industry with a lot of data compliance regulations, as automated software will allow you to stay ahead of and comply with all the newly changing regulations. 

Inability to track the financial data of the company 

Inability to stay on top of your company’s finances, especially when you have a rapidly growing team that relies on business travel or a relatively small accounting team, is a clear sign that you need the ability to track expenses automatically. 

Such a solution will provide you with crucial insights on the ROI you are getting from business travel and further allow you to visualize which areas need more funding and which areas are overfunded or wasteful. 

Also, with the right expense management solution, companies can closely track how employees are making use of their credit cards/ petty cash advance in real-time. Another key benefit is that companies will be able to save on payroll taxes using an expense management solution because employee reimbursement is generally not considered to be taxable income. 

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, managing your company expenses, especially the T&E spending, through expense management software will go a long way in streamlining the reporting, approval, tracking, and reimbursement process and benefiting everyone from the finance team to the management to the employees who undertake business travel. Having all your spending information appropriately organized with comprehensive reports will further make tax season less stressful for companies. So, if your company exhibits any of the above mentioned signs, feel free to reach us for a demo at [email protected] or book a call at https://www.expenseout.com/. 

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The definitive guide to managing petty cash advance in 2022

Cash advances have become one of the most common ways for employers to fund the business travel operations of their employees, including utilities, local transport, and daily meals. However, managing cash advances has turned out to be a massive problem for the accounting team due to the multiple business meetings, travel spending needs, and projects that companies have going on simultaneously. 

Here’s what’s causing the accounting woes for companies and how to fix them. 

The present scenario–a broken cash management system

Traditional means of managing cash advances have failed and consequently caused the following hurdles to the audit readiness of organizations. 

  • Violation of crucial Travel and Expense (T&E) policies while processing urgent request
  • Delays and errors during the reimbursement process due to manual processing of cash advances
  • Large scale, unchecked expense fraud 
  • Poor employee experience due to the tedious nature of acquiring cash advances 
  • Inability to make exceptions for cash advances in urgent situations

What causes friction in the process of getting cash advances for business travel?

Most organizations have a manual process for handling cash advances, and this opens the process to all the following issues that affect every level of the company. 

  • Employees must fill out tiring forms or send emails constantly for cash advances.
  • The manager must sift through countless emails and/or paper forms to check and grant the request. 
  • Exceptions can’t be processed quickly as managers have to manually reach out to higherups for approvals.
  • There’s no transparency, so employees have no idea about the status of their cash advance request.
  • Lack of transparency about non reimbursable expenses
  • Discrepancies arise in the expense reports 

The ultimate fix for petty cash management hurdles—automation

Automation of the entire process of petty cash management has untold benefits in terms of time saved and fraud prevented. With the right solution, both the employer and the employees can breathe easy because their life has been made better in the following aspects:

  • Every expense receipt is accounted for
  • Enhanced transparency when it comes to the status of the payment request 
  • Automated policy compliance for all expenses
  • Seamless payment collection
  • Easy to process urgent requests
  • Companies can prepare quickly for audits
  • Hassle-free and quick reimbursements for employees
  • Weeds out duplicate or fraudulent requests
  • Repetitive approval workflows are automated

ExpenseOut’s unparalleled petty cash advance management capabilities

Managing petty cash for business travel may seem like a trivial matter that you can manage with a few forms or spreadsheets or an email thread.

 However, when you consider the hours you spend tracking, reporting, reimbursing, and accounting for every single cash advance request, you will see how an automated solution like ExpenseOut can do wonders for you.

Here’s an overview of how ExpenseOut approaches the cash advance process that is key to every company’s financial health. 

  • The employees raise a cash advance request via the ExpenseOut web portal or app.
  • The request is automatically checked against the T&E policy of the company
  • The manager or admin gets a real-time notification of the request
  • The manager/ admin approves the request, and the money gets credited
  • If the cash advance is unused, the system automatically initiates a refund

Conclusion

Sounds fascinating? Your company can also save countless hours of time and innumerable resources by automating petty cash management. If you want a preview of what ExpenseOut can do for you, feel free to reach [email protected] for a demo/ quote.