Monthly Archives: April 2022

When thinking about an expense management system, the first thing that comes to mind is the harried business travelers. They keep hundreds of receipts, manually entering all the trip details in the excel spreadsheet.

With a modern expense management system, your employees can snap a picture of the receipt, upload them to the digital vault, and then get the expense instantly approved for reimbursement by either the finance team or the manager. 

According to a survey by Levvel research, organizations that adopted Travel and expense management systems improved expense report accuracy by 30%, reduced paper volume by 20%, and saved time for creating and processing expense reports by 25%.

This level of effectiveness shown by automated expense management solutions is hardly surprising.

Why is managing expenses using excel not a good idea?

Travel and expense reports are handled manually at the end of each month, especially in many small organizations. Employees gather receipts and enter all the details, such as category, vendor, dates, etc., in the spreadsheets. They then submit their receipts to the finance team or the management for approval. While this process appears to work fine, it is inefficient. There is a lot of manual handling that takes time, which costs money. Also, the process is error-prone, and it cannot prevent fraud, such as duplicate receipts. 

Why is an expense management solution beneficial?

An expense management solution is beneficial for every business, no matter what the size is. It is cost-effective, reduces error frequency, and provides better insights to keep track of an organization’s financial health. Below are some reasons why expense management software is better than excel spreadsheets.

• Automation

Manually entering every trip detail in the expense reports is time-consuming for your employees. Subsequently, the finance team spends much time acting on the expense data. The expense management automation becomes the savior and lets your employees submit all the expense receipts as and when they pay. The process is much easier using OCR-based receipt management. With this software, your finance team can keep track of all the expense reports, as everything is stored in the cloud and can be accessed with a few clicks.

• Automated approval workflow

In a typical expense approval process, each employee sends the expense spreadsheet to the finance team, accompanied by a folder full of expense receipts. The finance team manually reconciles all the receipts, approves, or denies the claim, processes the payment, and records all the claims for future auditing purposes. It takes a lot of time and effort, particularly when employees attempt to claim reimbursements for expenses against company policy.

Meanwhile, an expense management solution automates the process of expense policy compliance. The system uses AI to check and weed out fraudulent or non-compliant claims and instantly approves legit reimbursement claims.

• Fast-track reimbursements

Manual reporting and reimbursement generally take over seven days, leading to massive employee dissatisfaction. An automated reporting system can expedite the reimbursement process, ensuring claims are approved in seconds.

• Improves policy compliance

Once various expenses start coming in, it is hard for the finance team to validate all the details in the spreadsheets manually. Manually processing expenses also leads to the approval of claims that don’t adhere to company policy. For instance, employees may have claimed reimbursement for personal travel expenses, citing them as clients’ visits.

Employers can ensure almost 100% policy compliance using an automated expense management solution. Employees and the management are instantly notified when non-compliant claims are made. There is also an option for employees to either remove the claim or modify it based on company policy.

• Real-time visibility and spend control

One of the best benefits of automated expense reporting is integrating with accounting software quickly. The seamless integration with the finance software allows the automated expense system to generate custom reports. These reports help the finance team analyze employee spending and cut down the costs of any expenses that go out of budget.

Conclusion

Excel spreadsheets for expense reporting are annoying for business travelers, and they are also a source of pain for the finance team and managers. Switching to an automated expense management system is a win-win situation for everyone. Using automated solutions will only help scale the business, make it easier for employees to get reimbursed, and even allow the managers to make optimal decisions while ensuring policy compliance.

ExpenseOut is here to help you get rid of spreadsheets for managing expenses to leverage the power of automation.

Schedule a demo to learn how our automated expense management software can benefit your business.

Delayed reimbursement from companies is one of the most significant causes of frustration for business travellers. 

While the delays are not intentional, management, finance teams, and HR professionals must look at what’s causing the reimbursements to be processed days or weeks after an employee has submitted a receipt or an expense report.  

Now, how can speedier reimbursements be achieved? 

To know that we first need to delve into what causes the delays in the first place. 

What causes delays in expense reimbursement? 

Turns out, legacy means of expense management are to blame. 

Typically, employees must fill out lengthy spreadsheets, maintain all their paper receipts, send detailed emails, or spend hours putting together an expense report before they can file a reimbursement claim.

Following this tedious process, the expense report goes through two or three rounds of verification by the finance team and the management before the final go-ahead is given for releasing the reimbursement to the employee.

To make matters worse, companies can have confusing or vague travel and expense (T&E) policies that make it even harder for employees to send in accurate expense reports.

Because expense fraud is on the rise, reimbursements are delayed even more due to the additional checks required to weed out fraudulent receipts or previously claimed expenses. 

Automation—the surefire way to faster reimbursements

With an automated expense management solution, like ExpenseOut, the days of employees waiting for several days or even weeks for their reimbursement claims to be approved are long behind us.

Given its groundbreaking AI capabilities, OCR functionality, real-time policy checking, mobile-friendly design, and multi-level approval feature, employees can get their reimbursements in seconds.

Here’s how ExpenseOut makes expense management seamless at every touchpoint.

At the employee level

Gone are the days of filling out spreadsheets and carrying around crummy receipts. With ExpenseOut at their disposal, employees can snap a picture of their receipt, have it stored in the digital vault, or send it instantly to the finance team or management for approval. 

All of this can be done on the go! 

The OCR functionality allows the software to capture all the essential details and send a detailed report to the management, finance team, or HR professional. 

Notably, when there is a policy violation, the employee is notified before the submission occurs. The employee can either remove/ replace the expense item or leave an explanation. This feature will come in handy, especially when premium clients are involved, and the employee must buy dinner at a fancy restaurant or book flights at the last minute to meet with them. 

At the finance team level

The finance team is instantly notified when an employee submits the expense report. It is worth mentioning that the software automatically cross-references the receipts with previous submissions to ensure duplicate expenses are not reimbursed. 

Also, suppose there is any policy violation. It shows up on the finance team’s dashboard, which allows them to seek clarification or reject the reimbursement claim without any direct interaction with the employee. 

However, if the expense is legit, the finance team can initiate the reimbursement in seconds. 

The finance team can quickly credit the reimbursements to the employee’s salary account due to ExpenseOut’s ability to integrate with Human Resource Management Software and accounting tools. 

At the management level

With the click of a button, the management can approve or reject reimbursement claims.

ExpenseOut also allows the management to pre-approve expenses.  Instead of exchanging emails or filling out forms, the employee can quickly raise a request, mentioning the reason for the expense. The management can weigh the merits of the expense based on the company’s T&E policy, which is a process automated by ExpenseOut.

Expense requests with red flags are immediately identified by the software’s AI and brought to the management’s attention in real-time so that they can make decisions optimally. 

Given this streamlining of the approval process, the management can clear reimbursement requests in seconds and focus on more important work. 

Conclusion

Irrespective of your company size, ExpenseOut’s automaton capabilities will speed up your expense reimbursement process and bring down the time taken to process claims to mere seconds.

With ExpenseOut at your disposal, you can focus on more important tasks while being confident that not a single fraudulent claim has been reimbursed and that your employees are thoroughly satisfied with their business travel regime.

Take your reimbursement process to the next level with ExpenseOut. Try it for free now!