If No One Made Mistakes, Excel-Based Expense Reports Might Still Work

If math is not your strong point, Excel may save you from addition errors, but a spreadsheet is only as accurate as the information you type into it. And lots of us have trouble with this seemingly simple task of entering the right numbers into the spreadsheet, so errors happen.

And when errors happen in expense reports, they get kicked back for correction: Accuracy is the submitter’s job, after all, not the approver’s!

[Related: Estimate your savings from converting to automated expense reports.]

Kickbacks (in this definition) waste time, especially if the kickback process is manual (even if it involves emailing excel files back and forth rather than paper copies.)

Plus, the whole report gets held up, not just the erroneous item, so the submitter has to wait longer for reimbursement.?You create an unhappy employee, who is spending extra time on the bureaucratic tasks of getting his or her own money back.?This drops the employee?s productivity. This is bad for the company.

Frankly, whatever money you spend to reduce or remove the chance for errors in expense reporting will come back to the company in higher revenue from harder-working employees.

Do you believe that the added productivity saving a few expense report errors could add up to a measurable amount? How much time does a typical traveling employee in your organization spend dealing with the expense report process? Has anyone on your team complained about it?

If so, you may have found your first source for productivity improvement!