Improve Your Company’s Financial Health by Automating Expense Reports

Although employees may be traveling less and working from home more, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t submitting expense reports almost as frequently as they did before the events of the last few years. Generally, travel costs have been reduced, due to the continued prevalence of online meetings. However, that hasn’t eliminated the risk of unnecessary or fraudulent spending.

If your company is still using spreadsheets to keep track of paper expense reports and receipts, your accounting department staff is wasting untold hours on scanning and data entry. You're also losing out on the opportunity to track and monitor employee spending to identify potential savings. You can’t rein in expenses if you don’t have an overview of how money is being spent and how much each expense category is costing your company by department and individual. 

The business benefits of automating expense report processing

With the centralised database, powerful search, automated workflows and integration options offered by document management:

Your employees can:

• Use an app like PaperScan, a free scan app for Apple and Android smartphones, to capture receipts from anywhere whether at home or on the road
• Eliminate the hassle of saving  paper receipts
• Reduce the time it takes to upload receipts, create expense reports and submit them for approval
• Benefit from faster expense reimbursement

Your approvers can:

• Stop relying on memory because automated workflow alerts them when new expense reports are ready to be reviewed and reminds them of monthly deadlines
• More easily check to determine whether an expense is business-related
• Approve expenses from anywhere at any time to speed up the reimbursement process

Your accounting department can:

• Reduce errors associated with manual processes like mistyping data or sending reports that with missing information to an approver
• Prevent duplicate reimbursements and identify reimbursements that are not legitimately business-related
• Easily enforce policies regarding missing receipts, late submissions, mileage overstatements and credit card misuse
• More efficiently keep track of what has been approved and paid
• Limit the possibility of fraud with visibility into:

• • Which employees have exceeded spending limits
  • Whether employees who are in the same role have differing expenses
  • A comparison of an employee’s previous spending habits to current ones

Your finance and executive teams can:

• Monitor spending through monthly departmental reports so managers or an audit department can review exceptions to company policy
• Turn expense reporting information into searchable data to use for analysis and setting cost-saving guidelines
• Respond efficiently to the increasing number of regulatory requirements regarding expense reimbursement

5 characteristic to look for when choosing expense report automation software 

Expense reporting software should:

1. Use email automation to capture and route receipts 
2. Integrate with your accounting, payroll or ERP software 
3. Provide a mobile app that enables employees to capture receipts and submit expenses from their mobile phones 
4. Enable managers to see a list of their pending expense reports in a single view 
5. Offer real-time monitoring that enforces company policies and automatically rejects non-compliant expense reports