Employees Vs. Finance department – Who benefits the most with automated expense reporting process?
Managing expenses manually can take a toll on productivity to employee satisfaction. A solution that automates the expense reporting process can streamline business operations and minimize costs by cutting paperwork.
Why automate the expense reporting process?
Organizations tend to leverage all tools to operate efficiently, and businesses often overlook expense management for various reasons. Reasons include relying on legacy systems and feeling comfortable working with spreadsheets and paper reports. Regardless of the reason, every business should understand that a manual expense reporting process can hinder your organization’s process.
Traditional processes may get the work done, but they are time-consuming and error-prone and do not provide any visibility into spending. Also, spreadsheets make your expense reporting process slow and cumbersome.
Who benefits from expense management?
The manual expense reporting process frustrates managers and employees. Different teams have different goals, and here are some examples of who will benefit from expense management.
Financial departments
When paper-based spreadsheets are used, you can figure out valuable data about how much is spent, by whom, and other hidden costs. With expense solutions, finance departments can see where every penny goes, whether reimbursements are paid each time, and what errors exist – not to mention having a clear view into overall cash flow.
Managers
Legacy processes and poor coordination between IT and finance departments would result in poor spend management. When managers and finance departments work together to automate the expense process, it could result in greater employee satisfaction and compliance. When you implement automated cloud-based solutions, it can lessen the burden on support teams.
Employees
In today’s digital world, employees expect technology to sort out the problems they have in their work. Leveraging cloud-based solutions would take out the pain involved in the tedious expense reporting process. By giving employees what they want, you can keep them happy and stay productive and let them do their job proactively.
C-level executives
C-level people want what works best for employees, always want to keep costs low and profits high, and automated expense reporting solutions efficiently do all of these.
What should you look at in automated expense management?
While implementing expense solution is a good idea, not all solutions are the same. Once you have a sound system in place, it would be easy to establish an expense policy and make it work well. The following are a few considerations that can help choose expense solution and create policies around it to work well:
Ideal expense report software should:
- Streamline expense process with e-receipts
- Auto-populate expense reports with receipts from airlines, hotels, and transportation services
- Integrate with existing ERP solutions
- Credit card reconciliation
- Track expense data
- Mobile app
Ideal expense policies and processes should
- Make the process simple and easy to follow
- Push inappropriate or non-compliant expense submissions
- Gather expense information
- Be easy to submit and approve expenses from anywhere
- Reimburse expenses quickly
- Analyze data and find cost-saving opportunities
So, now you understand that expense report automation can positively impact your business. It is not just in dollars and cents but also in productivity, compliance, fraud prevention, and employee satisfaction. Check out how SutiExpense can help build a hassle-free expense reporting process.
