5 Must-do’s to Disrupt Business Expense Reporting in Real-time

Digitizing T & E gives better visibility into spending, which means improving employee satisfaction by making informed decisions and faster reimbursements. Ultimately, this would expedite the expense reporting process and reduces risk while enhancing compliance with corporate travel & spending policies.

Achieving this can be a challenge when employees are moving across multiple business units and geographies as each unit will have its own reimbursement budget priorities and approval workflows. Deploying T & E platform alone is not the only solution; you have to follow the best practices to manage your T & E processes efficiently.

Millenials Demand Modern Solutions

Travel and entertainment expenses account for a major portion of business spending, which is why modern expense management solutions should be set in place in order to gain control of your spend.

Here are our recommendations for your business to help achieve digital T & E-excellence:

Enhance the Global Experience through Better Expense Management

Increasing global supply chains will increase the need to manage your changing expenses. For managing varies policies effectively, you have to:

• Create effective and appropriate policies that can be executed across various geographies and business units

• Clearly, communicate the policies in a consistent way across business units and geographies

• Configure T & E systems to offer a seamless experience for employees in terms of expense reporting

• Ensure that relocation spending and reimbursement is compliant with the organizational policies

Many challenges arise when company’s policies are not clearly communicated to employees. Configuring a T & E solution alongside a global policy covering all expense types for employee groups and managing corporate card transactions can set your business for success.

Refine your Approval Workflows

Approval workflows will make sure that you have the appropriate degree of control over various levels of T & E spending. It’s nothing but routing expenses to a default approver based on the corporate hierarchy with privileges to restrict amounts they can approve based on their claims or other company policies.

Every business is different and its internal approval process is unique. One approach is to map project managers to projects and/or cost centers and the other way is to set up approvers based on the cost centers. In addition, there might be other approval workflows to consider when implementing spend management solution. It is important to determine your needs and choose a solution that best fits your approval workflows.

Outlining Right Policies and Forms

Every organization may have different business models, cost structures, profitability levels and corporate cultures. Your expense management solution should offer substantial flexibility in defining policies.

Differentiating employees into groups is the first thing you should do to enforce different policies to various groups and/or that will be managed by multiple authorities. The best practice is to configure group by country or line of business.

SutiExpense allows organizations to enforce various policies within the groups. Major tasks such as workflows, receipt handling, and expense types can be determined by the policies. The expense types and other controls determined for each group can be enforced through multiple policies or audit rules based on the expense type.

Mapping Travel Booking to Expenses

SutiExpense provides various options for users to create an expense report. One way is to navigate to the travel booking option within our expense solution wherein you can book tickets and then synchronize those details into the expense report. The alternative way is to create an expense report using the SutiExpense Mobile application. Through travel-expense integration, you can match the itinerary details with what your employee has claimed in the expense report. This would check if an expense report matches with an existing travel reservation, which in turn drives travel policy compliance metrics.

However, users usually book flight tickets well in advance of their travel to get better rates. In this case, the user submits the airfare prior to submitting any other expenses to avoid the late fees. In these cases, SutiExpense matches the trip details with the expense report submitted and prevents employees to submit the expense claims again for the same travel. This can help the organization take steps to reduce the risk of non-matching reservation expenses. Having a single solution that shows all non-travel matching expenses based on the travel details can help companies reconcile and validate expense details easily. This would reduce 50% of the time for the finance team would spend on validating expense claims. However, these expenses will be reviewed again by the audit team to identify any risks or non-compliance expense claims.

Receipt Management

Effective receipt management has a significant impact on your employees in terms of ease of use, productivity, and satisfaction. It also affects the overall cost of ownership and the amount of work that approvers must do. That is why SutiExpense provides various options for users to add receipts to your expense reports. Allowing users to upload receipts through a mobile application makes the process faster and easier. Since all the receipts are uploaded through mobile/desktop, it becomes easy for auditors to validate the process for reclaiming VAT and ensuring tax compliance. The solution allows you to add receipts at line item level and expense report level. Managing receipts manually will make the process more complex to manage compliance and conduct auditing. When employees submit receipts through smart devices, the receipt capture can trigger the automatic creation of an expense report, reducing manual effort and minimizing auditing costs.

With increasing business travel costs, the management of T & E costs transforms from an administrative function to a strategic differentiator. The SutiSpend platform provides an integrated and digital approach to T & E spending, which increases visibility into business spending while cutting down operational costs.