The definitive guide to managing petty cash advance in 2022

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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.

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