Are you haunted by the thought of expense reports? If so, it's likely that your company is still stuck with outdated systems and could greatly benefit from implementing automated expense management software.
Continuing to rely on excel spreadsheets, paper receipts, or even an older expense solution will only lead to more problems. This is especially true if your aim is to gain better control over your organisation's expenses.
One of the biggest challenges of manually processing expense reports is the amount of time it takes at each step. And as we all know, time is money. So how exactly does expense management software improve this equation?
Waste less time with automated expense management
By implementing expense management software, your employees can say goodbye to time-consuming tasks that provide little value, such as manually entering expenses and attaching physical receipts. These tasks are often put off, leading to problems with your accounts and delays in reimbursements.
In addition, automating your approval processes not only increases compliance with corporate policies but also reduces the chances of errors and fraud. This saves time for employees submitting expenses (no more mistakes to correct), approvers (compliant items can be automatically approved), and controllers (out-of-policy items are visually flagged).
Submit and track receipts more easily
We can all agree that manually submitting expense claims, with all their receipts, is a tedious task. Not only is it time consuming, but it can also be frustrating when a receipt is misplaced or an item is forgotten.
Your employees should be focusing on their higher added value tasks, not on corralling bits and pieces of paper. With a mobile expense app based on Optical Character Recognition, expenses can be created immediately with a simple tap on a mobile device. While OCR extracts the data, the image is stored digitally meaning no more faded receipts in random jacket pockets.
Digitally tracking and submitting expenses ensures that there are no losses, no duplicates, and no delays in expense claims.
Lower your costs per expense report
With the simple shift from manual to automatic expense report processing, your organisation will benefit from interesting cost savings.
On average, an expense report costs upward of EUR 25 to process manually. In comparison, it only costs about EUR 6 to automatically process expense reports. That's less than a quarter of the cost.
Investing in an expense management solution is therefore a sure-fire way to reach your cost savings goal, especially in times when spend control is key.
Improve your spend visibility
Expense management software makes it easier for your company to keep track of spending. Because you can't manage what you can't measure, it is important to be able to accurately measure your expenses so as to assess and possibly reduce your costs.
Automation improves your expense tracking, processing and storing, but it also provides you with business intelligence tools to give you visibility over and help you analyse your spending. Whether you are interested in a high level view or drilling down into business units, you can do both. Because the data going into the application is more accurate, so are your reports, creating a solid base on which to make your strategic decisions.
Increase employee satisfaction - and efficiency
When you make it faster and easier for employees to claim their expenses, you're also making things easier on yourself. Gone are the days of receiving daily complaints regarding a complicated expense reporting process. Forgotten are the times when employees would demand weekly payment updates or blame the company for outstanding payments.
Besides, happy employees are 13% more productive. This means that by simply automating your expense management, not only will you be saving time and money, you will also be increasing your company's overall productivity.
Heightened company policy compliance
Fraud is an unfortunate reality for any company, but even more so companies that rely on manual cost control. Human error also factors into company losses. Expense management automation does away with both fraud and errors with integrated cross-checks and controls.
It allows you to identify and prevent mistakes and abuses before they take place, preventing that cash from ever unnecessarily leaving your account. Automated expense management also improves policy compliance as well as employee knowledge of your policies. And if a fraudster knows they are likely to get caught, they will think twice before submitting that fake receipt.
The best expense management system is the one that grows with you and helps maximise your business' potential.
