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/.
