Expense Report Solution Designed for Canadian Organizations
Whether you work in an SME or a multi-national company, managing employee expenses is a part of life. For some employees, it is just attending a seminar, and for others, it could be taking frequent trips around the world. Organizations need to make sure that they manage expenses efficiently for the end users and the finance department has to process the expenses and ensure reimbursement is accurate.
Enterprises should be able to control the organization’s travel and out-of-pocket expenses to avoid fraudulent spend. The best practice is to adapt expense management software that enables employees to submit expenses while streamlining the approval process with efficient workflows and business rules.
Taking a manual approach of submitting receipts and spreadsheets is painstaking. The first step is to automate the process. Automating expense submission process can cut costs by 75%, and a solution that makes it easy to submit expenses from any mobile is the key. However, not all expense solutions are designed to work with Canadian organizations, which often have specific requirements for employee expense management.
The following are three key areas to consider when implementing an expense solution for Canadian organization:
Tax Reclamation
Travel and other expenses are associated with sales taxes that differ based on the purchase type and the province or territory. Many of the reclaimable taxes that save a million dollars for an organization can be time-consuming to calculate and submit.
Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that the expense solution you choose can effectively manage GST, PST, and HST. This means you can automatically calculate the tax payable on each line item based on the category and location from where the transaction is done. This allows AP departments to create reports within the expense system that can be exported into the organization’s system. If you are not doing this, you have to spend countless hours reviewing spreadsheets.
Automobile Allowance Calculation
Tracking automobile allowance can be a challenge. Not only territories have different rates than the provinces; these rates change after you drive more than 5000km using the personal automobile. Automated expense report solution can simplify this process. Users need to enter the locations where they drove when submitting expenses and the solution maps the distances and automatically calculates the distance.
This would then track the distance driven for the user and will automatically adjust the reimbursement rate once the threshold has been reached. Given the prices change each year, you have to ensure to keep track of this. Expense report software should do this automatically, so you remain compliant. If your organization has employees working overseas, you should check that expense solution hold the same capabilities to ensure regulatory compliance.
Where is Data Hosted?
Data protection regulations bind all Canadian organizations, including private-sector, federal or provinces. Although employee expense data is business information, it consists of any personal data, which is bound by the regulations. Therefore, there are several requirements that businesses should adhere to for data storage.
Expense report solution is the best bet for Canadian organizations that want to make employee expense reporting effective.
