Expense Reports on Paper: Why You Should Stop Using Them

There is no joy in delaying expense reporting where managers have to keep asking employees for reports continuously for reimbursement. However, think about the long and tiresome process of reporting expenses on paper- writing down all the expenses, gathering those receipts, filing them properly, and finally submitting them to your manager.

Few organizations all over the world still maintain spreadsheets or do it by hand. Gathering receipts, listing down all expenditures, and filing them neatly by hand takes a lot of time. So, leveraging automated expense management software makes the whole process easy and quick so you can spend more time on important work.

Here, we present a few good reasons why companies should switch to an online expense reporting software and ditch the pen and paper method.

• Lost or Misplaced Receipts

It is very difficult to handle little pieces of paper, store them in an organized manner at your desk or in metal file cabinets. Moreover, paper receipts not only sometimes get misplaced but the content written on it can also fade over time. When you have delays in submitting reporting expenses, your manager is not able to view what the actual receipts have to say and thus leaves piles of pen and paper reports at the mercy of bad quality ink.

• Inappropriate Reimbursement Request

When reporting expenses manually, there are many backlogged expense records piled up on the desk and reporting inappropriate values or scribbling numbers on the record may seem confusing to managers who are reading your reports. You need to be more careful and avoid such mistakes as they may lead you to lose money that you should have had reimbursed.

• Paper Makes the Work of Finance Department More Difficult

Your finance department has to handle a lot of paperwork when they have to deal with employee accounting entries for reports. Starting from credit, debit, and reconciling bank statements, they need to take care of everything and enter all data correctly from paper documents in their online accounts software, wasting finance teams’ valuable resources and energy.

• Reimbursement Process Takes Too Long

Every single expense report has to go through multiple levels of approval before the reimbursement process is executed. This can take a long time when a single manager has to approve numerous reports simultaneously.

For instance, the finance department often handles a larger number of reports submitted by other employees in the organization. With an automated expense reporting process, it will take much less time to approve reports whereas, when there are piles of papers on the desk for verification, the process turns out to be cumbersome and extremely slow.

• Paper Based Expense Reports are Time-Consuming

Sales teams at your organization are always thinking of avenues where they can find more leads and convert them into customers. But think about the salespeople taking out their valuable time to write down their daily expenses on a sheet of paper and later reporting them to their manager. They are consistently losing time that could have been spent on converting leads. This immense time loss is applicable to every team in an organization.

The Bottom Line

Paper records need physical storage and are difficult to track when you need them. Also, there are chances that your paper records may get misplaced, stolen, or destroyed. So, move your organization out of the Stone Age, save your money and time by adopting an online expense reporting solution.