Technology Overcomes the Biggest Challenge Business Travelers Take On – Reporting Expenses
Tracking your employee-initiated expenses has gotten a lot easier with technology. Right from mobile applications to online travel booking websites, technology allows employees to record and create expense reports as they move around, so they don’t have to spend time sitting in front of the desktop to submit expense reports.
In fact, technology is eliminating the biggest headaches that travelers face – Keeping track of receipts, submitting expense reports, and worrying about certain charges.
Creating a Win-Win Situation
Besides streamlining expense report process, technology is helping businesses save money by making it easy for employees to comply with the company’s T & E policies. Earlier, employees used to snap photos instead of collecting paper receipts. But now, technology has made this process much simpler through voice recognition and GPS data facilities. Today, employees can open the smartphone and say the line items in the microphone, so that the app can automatically create an expense line item in the expense report under a particular category.
The expense report software solution also has the mileage calculator feature which keeps track of travelers’ miles and allows them to create an expense report for that. Moreover, travel-booking websites are helping organizations stay within the T & E policy allowing employees to select the lowest fare for trips.
As the tools have made it easy to record expenses, companies have seen an increase in the number of employees willing to travel. Earlier, employees had to wait for two to three weeks to get reimbursed but now the technology is making reimbursements within days and not weeks. This has encouraged employees as they don’t have to wait for too long. Also, this gives you a complete view of total expenses so that you can track top spenders and see who is spending what. The automated software allows managers to set parameters and alerts when an employee uses the corporate card for unauthorized categories or unapproved merchants. This way you can stop wasteful spend before happening or before it starts. Expense report software can accelerate the reimbursement process and reduce the scope for expense fraud.