Challenges of Using Manual Expense Reporting and How to Overcome Them
Although 2018 had been a year of technological advancement in how businesses handle travel and expense reporting, many expense reporting trends of the previous year remains constant. Even today, many organizations are still using manual processes for handling travel and expense.
Continuous use of manual systems for T&E management such as pen and paper or excel spreadsheets has extensive implications. For instance, organizations have to constantly struggle with repetitive problems which have been afflicting travel and expense for many years.
Don’t fear, there is a solution to this grave problem! If your organization is still struggling to manage T&E effectively, then it’s the right time for you to take charge of expense reporting.
Using Manual Expense System
Today, more than 40% of organizations are still tracking expense reports using manual processes. Manual systems put a lot of pressure on the employees to give correct output in every detail of their work, but, the manual process can be prone to human errors and ends up with inaccurate data entry. Moreover, checking and reporting the data is a hugely time-consuming and expensive task.
Leveraging an easy to use travel and expense management solution can help to fix all the problems in T&E. The solution supports an increase in compliance and saves company time and money. It also makes claims processing much easier, track transactions, and make the reimbursement process quick for the employees.
Recurring Problems in the Department and How Automation Can Help
It is observed that employees often lose or misplace receipts and submit their expense reports without proof. This problem can be easily solved with an automated travel and expense management system that allows employees to upload receipts directly. The employees need to take a picture of their paper receipts with their smartphone and upload them to the system.
Another noteworthy problem in expense reporting is that it plagues the finance department because of how much time they spend on reviewing, reconciling, and approving expense reports. So, automated expense reporting systems help you to streamline and speed up the entire process along with catching and preventing errors.
How Organizations Can Improve Expense Reporting
Managing travel expenses takes a lot of time and is an expensive process, but, there is always some kind of pressure to improve travel and expense management. Like previous years, minimizing expenses and improving the entire process are the top requirements of businesses. Many a time, this may include finding a way to create and enforce organizations travel policy.
The other problem is organizations have trouble using the data they collect from T&E. If they can enhance complete visibility into how much employees are actually spending, where the money is exactly going, and other pain points, the finance team can leverage the data to forecast future trends. Acquiring complete visibility will make for more strategic planning and decision-making.
The Bottom Line
T&E automation system can fix even the biggest travel and expense issues that organizations are facing today. It is also the key to improve how organizations handle the entire process of expense reporting from collecting receipts, approval, and leveraging gathered data in forecasting.
