3 Reasons to Automate your Expense Management Processes

For employees, gathering and organizing reports to submit expense claims can be filled with frustrations. On the other hand, manually going through every single request and verifying it with the correct attached bill while following the company’s expense policies and guidelines is tedious for the employers as well.

Many enterprises are managing their expense reports manually, still believing it as a cost-effective process. They don’t realize that a manual expense management process is consuming more time which could be dedicated to more productive projects.

According to the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA), on average, it will cost an average of $58 to manually process one expense report. Thus, the amount spent on managing all expense reports of the organization is more than you would like.

Adding to this, the manual, paper-based processes are prone to human errors that will impact your budget and productivity. Expense management software can help you automate the expense management processes while eliminating the tedious tasks involved and enhance your productivity.

Here we’ve listed how automated expense software helps you manage business expense reports effectively.

Eliminates Tedious Paperwork and Error-ridden Expense Reports

Manual expense report submission and processing claims leaves both employees and managers bogged with heaps of receipts and spreadsheets needing to be reviewed. Employees are usually required to submit their expense reports with supporting documents and explain the report details in order to be reimbursed.

While submitting paper-based reports, receipts may be lost or accidentally forgotten to be attached, which minimize the chances of getting reimbursed.

To get compensated for these lost receipts, employees may subtly manipulate the reimbursements by submitting fake receipts, which can increase company expenditures. Expense software enables employees to capture the receipts instantly using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to store them in the software.

This allows managers to automate the most tedious processes. Automation eliminates the paperwork involved in the manual paper-based process and saves your organization time and resources.

Improves Policy Compliance Rates

Every organization has its own expense policies. Both employees and approvers must understand the specific guidelines to ensure all expenses submitted are in accordance with the company’s policies. Mangers need to match every expense report with the correct submitted statement to identify the validity of the report, then approving the reimbursements.

When tracking the multitude of expenses reports manually, there is a high possibility for the out-of-policy receipts to slip through which can end up in reimbursement payments regardless of the policy violations.

However, the automated expense software is programmed to automatically verify the receipts against your customized expense policies, allowing you to prevent these out-of-the-policy expense reimbursements. It notifies both the approver and employee about the policy violations the moment they occur and enables the report to be rejected in just a few clicks.

Automates Time-consuming Processes

Gathering expense reports from employees, verifying those against company policies, and keeping track of business reports within a manual system can be challenging for the accounting department. Expense reporting software automates the reports submission and approval process while frees up the accounting team to concentrate on other productive tasks.

With OCR technology, the software automatically captures the necessary fields within the expense report and stores the data digitally in the cloud-based platform. It allows you to track each expense report whenever required regardless of time or geographical location.

The Bottom Line

Manual expense management processes are a pain for both the employees and the approvers/managers. Besides the erroneous reimbursements, manual paper-based processes require you to invest additional work hours in tracking reports, finding errors, and dealing with the fraudulent expenses found.

The automated expense management software allows employees to capture the expense reports instantly with various devices such as smartphones and stores them in a secured platform, allowing you to track the reports hassle-free. So, it might be the right time to start adopting an expense management solution to help you handle company expenses more productively while saving time and money.