Establishing a Successful Expense Management Policy

A well-enforced business expense management policy can cut costs, enhance administrative efficiency, and improve employees’ overall experience. To maintain accurate and compliant expense management, organizations should establish a firm expense management policy. It should cover the entire process, from pre-authorization to expense reimbursement. Here, we list a few considerations for establishing a top expense management policy.

Proper guidelines:

Initially, expense policy should define what your organization will and will not reimburse and under what conditions. Employees are using their own choices while booking travel trips or hotels, and in such scenarios proper expense guidelines will help them make decent choices.

Definite time-limits:

Expense management process should be smooth moving, as your AP department wants to account as soon as possible and employees want to be reimbursed quickly. Develop a proper schedule so that everyone involved in the process from expense reporting to approval are aware of the deadlines. You should clearly define details about submission grace periods and scenarios when you will deny reimbursement for late submissions.

Simple procedure:

Expense reporting procedure should be easy-to-manage so that your employees seamlessly get on board with the process and avoid mistakes. It also helps develop your expense management system to fit your unique business needs. Detailed information about pre-approval procedure, compliance, recordkeeping, expense approval and reimbursement time should be included in it.

Easy communication:

Expense management policy should be easy for your employees to understand and access. It should not contain jargon and try to maintain more than one format so that your employees can go through it at their convenience. Managers should be familiar with the policy so that they are able to answer employees’ queries.

Expense management software with well-established corporate policy automates your expense management process and ensures proper spend control.