Getting Started with Digital Transformation: How to go Paperless

 

Introduction: The shift to paperless expense management 

In an increasingly paperless world, digital transformation is essential to running an efficient business. In practical terms, it is a long and often arduous journey. Often it’s hard to know where to begin, but one area that offers immediate returns – with minimal disruption – is expense management. It’s the perfect example of technology working as it should: as an enabler of growth. 
 
In this article, we’ll take a brief look at the traditional challenges of a paper-based way of accounting, and dive into how businesses are moving towards increasingly innovative solutions for managing employee expenses, underpinned by AI. 

The benefits of going paperless 

The pitfalls of using paper receipts for managing expenses are well known to any business owner. Receipts being lost, manual data entry errors (often spread across multiple platforms) and delayed reimbursements are common features of even the most dynamic and well-run companies. The immediate benefits of going paperless are obvious: increased efficiency, reduced costs and enhanced compliance management. But it’s also the first link in a transformational chain. It helps speed up the approval process, improves data management and security by backing up documents automatically, and reduces future impacts on the environment. 

On paper, the results speak for themselves. Our data shows that digital archiving expenses save an average of €1.40 per report. With a typical company producing an estimated 50,000 reports every year, these savings can have a material impact on profitability, as well as efficiency.

Opportunities for automation and digitisation vary between countries. For example, digital signatures are often – but not always – required. As a result, businesses need to develop solutions that account for process variances without having to overhaul and localise their expense operations in each market.

At Mobilexpense, we support the implementation of paperless solutions across most of the EU*, as well as the UK, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, Egypt, Canada and the USA. Our solution works across borders and for companies of all sizes: from SMBs to enterprise. But more on that later. 

Digital transformation as a foundation for automation

Digitisation is more than just another word for operational efficiency. It helps lay the groundwork for another transformational trend: automation. Moving from manual, paper-based expense processes to digital workflows enables the seamless capture, storage, and retrieval of expense data – all in seconds. This digital foundation creates the opportunity for automation tools to streamline tasks, like expense categorisation, receipt processing and approval workflows.

Digitising your documents has other benefits, too. It means making better use of your storage capacity. After all, what takes up more space: a hard drive or a room full of filing cabinets? It also means you can find what you’re looking for – and quickly. Fast file retrieval is one of the main reasons businesses choose to adopt paperless solutions, minimising the challenges caused by being audited.

Faster reimbursements, greater accuracy, improved security and governance, and more resources spent on driving your business forward (not trying to recall what happened last month). As a result, embracing digitisation fully is a critical step towards not only a truly intelligent and automated expense management system, but across the wider business, where repeatable and scalable decisions are no longer made by individuals, and extra capacity and capability is unleashed to fuel business growth.   

This cannot happen in a vacuum. A complex web of often competing local and European regulations presents additional challenges for businesses, including managing employee expenses. From GDPR’s requirements for data processing and storage, to the VAT Directive – which covers the reclaiming of VAT on business expenses across the EU – these rules can sometimes conflict with local laws, which creates headaches for businesses operating across multiple markets.

The solution is to implement a digital expense management system with compliance features built in, such as real-time VAT calculations, detailed audit trails, and automated updates to reflect policy changes. This can minimise legal risks and keep businesses compliant across borders – what we like to call change-proof global compliance.  

Improving data quality with digital tools 

Structured, clean data is the cornerstone for any business hoping to scale its operations efficiently. As companies grow, the volume of data generated from key functions – including customer engagement, sales and marketing – can quickly become overwhelming.  
 
This is why digitising business processes, and delivering enhanced data management, offers both immediate and long-term returns. While certain processes (like tax compliance) may not yet have reached a state of complete automation, digitisation ensures that the data driving these processes is available and accurate. In turn, clean data is essential for the successful implementation of advanced technologies like AI and machine learning. 

Also, when processes are digitised, data can be easily integrated across platforms, enabling businesses to optimise workflows and identify opportunities for automation in a range of areas, including expense tracking and reporting. The cumulative effect is higher ROI – even as businesses continue to bear the cost of working toward full automation. 

Leveraging AI for business transformation 

 
AI doesn’t just automate processes. Its ability to process vast amounts of data at speed has transformational implications for business operations and efficiency, including real-time and predictive capabilities that pave the way for more agile and responsive operations. In expense management, this might mean detection of fraudulent claims or flagging potential budget overruns. AI algorithms can also analyse trends in departmental spend, helping optimise and reallocate budgets and resources, allowing finance teams to focus on more complex and strategic projects.  

Improved data quality, coupled with the speed and efficiency created by automation, enhances decision making, which leads to more efficient and inter-dependent operations – reducing cost, saving resources, and increasing opportunities to grow revenue. By prioritising data quality – and therefore digitisation – now, businesses position themselves to scale smoothly in the future, ready to take advantage of emerging technologies and market opportunities. 

Take expense management. Companies do not have to wait until they reach huge scale to digitise some of their operations. We offer solutions for companies at all stages of evolution.  
 
MNCs, for example – including our clients in Germany and the UK – have offices spread across multiple locations and jurisdictions, with complex end-to-end finance and accounting configurations that require deep integration and flexibility for the future. We can offer them local implementations with international capabilities, including a highly customizable and managed compliance solution. 

Mid-market players might have less complex needs, but still require some versatility and a seamless user experience for their users – in this case a mobile app. Here we offer simplified integrations, easier configuration – included embedded payment cards – and a more standardised expense management solution.   

Conclusion: The future of expense management is paperless and intelligent

Transitioning to paperless workflows is the first step in modernising business operations, but the journey doesn’t stop there. As companies digitise their processes, they create a rich pool of structured data – an essential resource for AI adoption. By eliminating paper and manual processes, businesses set the stage for AI to intervene and further optimise operations through predictive analytics, information/data management and other data-driven capabilities.   
 
Given the domino effect of this transition, businesses should be encouraged to start their digital transformation now.

In a rapidly evolving market, particularly as AI starts to have a meaningful impact, it’s always a good time to think about streamlining your business processes. Wherever you are in your journey to going paperless, and incorporating AI into your ways of working – including expense management – we can help. Book a demo or give us a call to understand how you can take the next step to becoming a master of expense complexities. 

* Excludes Italy and Luxembourg