Business travel serves many functions and impacts a wide range of business objectives, from reinforcing sales to strengthening partnerships, training, customer service, and professional development. Yet many organizations fail to invest in streamlining their Travel and Expense management.
Businesses can no longer rely on manual and legacy systems for expense management. Moving forward, automated solutions for tracking and reimbursing expenses, cloud technology to store receipts, and AI to identify fraud in expense reports can help organizations streamline their business processes.
Here, we delve into those promising technologies in more detail and see how much of an impact they can have on the bottom line of companies.
Improving ROI with Automated Expense Management system
According to research, business travel expenses are the second most challenging operating cost to control. Investing in expense management software is worthwhile, especially if your employees travel a lot. An expense management system offers real-time visibility into your expenses, which will help your business with effective decision-making, policy formulation, and cost-cutting.
Digitize your expense management process
Forrester Consulting conducted a study on the Digital transformation of Travel and Expense (T&E). The outcome of 550 surveys indicates that many companies want to shift towards digital transformation. The survey respondents say that many organizations still rely on outdated tools that add more work burden to the employees, managers, and finance team. Participants agreed that digitization of expense management systems could improve user experience, increase efficiency, and provide detailed insights for better planning and cost control.
Making expense management mobile-friendly
Organizations need to implement technology that makes it easy for business travelers to create reports and apply for reimbursement seamlessly through desktops and mobile phones. Mobile accessibility lets employees track their expenses from anywhere in the world. Employees can use the mobile app to scan and upload receipts and report various expenses. Additionally, the managers or finance team can use the app to instantly approve or reject expense reports.
Integrated expense management solution
By integrating your expense management solution with enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resource management, or accounting software, you can be on top of your business expenses, boost employee productivity, and bring down your organization’s T&E spend.
Increased reliance on real-time insights
With working capital management continuing to be critical for many organizations, the ability to better forecast upcoming spending will be vital in 2022. Giving finance teams the insights that they need into corporate spending could also have a meaningful impact on decision-making and business growth.
The reporting and analytics feature of top expense management software provide real-time insight into company spending. It provides options to track expense reports by employee, project, and category.
With the help of analytics, organizations will uncover inefficient spending patterns and make better-informed decisions.
An AI-based fraud detection system
Detecting expense fraud and flagging claims that could violate T&E policy has always been an effort-intensive process. Currently, audits and reviews have spotted only around 12% of fraudulent instances. Leveraging AI could be game-changing in expense fraud management. Not only does this reduce the effort, but it will also drive accuracy and predict risks based on historical patterns.
Furthermore, AI is capable is scanning the expense reports in real-time so that reimbursements can be immediately checked in case of potential red flags.
With time, AI is expected to become predominant in expense management, bringing exceptional speed and accuracy in this field.
Conclusion
Travel remains an essential aspect for many organizations today. If your employees are frequent travelers, then you need to be aware of these latest trends in travel and expense management. Without a doubt, emerging technologies like AI, Cloud, and ML can help you automate travel and expense management and consequently streamline the auditing process and boost cost savings significantly.
