The Expense Reporting Landscape in 2020
Expense reporting is the crucial aspect that has to be managed accurately and on time in every organization. However, this is one of the non-exciting activities for employees and managers, especially for organizations that run on legacy paper-based solutions. With the advent of technology, expense reporting is changing at a slow pace, and the processes are getting smoothened, so you don’t have to break your head bothering about expense reporting and reimbursement processes.
Let’s take a look at how the expense reporting landscape is gaining its shape in 2020.
Automation to its extent
Let’s take any business; automation is driving businesses today. And, the same applies to expense reporting. Automating just the expense reporting process is not going to be sufficient. Automation is the absolute way to go in 2020. Receipt scanning and adding expenses is considered as a basic function for expense solution. Automating the expense management process right from start to finish is what current businesses are looking for.
Absolute automation comes with a lot of benefits. Besides saving significant time and money, automation ensures accuracy while minimizing human intervention. It will streamline the expense reporting process, which is otherwise considered as chaotic and frustrating.
Artificial intelligence
Automation solution still needs human inputs from time to time, which would result in errors. Human processed expenses will have either violated policies or flagged for errors, misuse, or fraud. This is where artificial intelligence can help. When used correctly, AI can streamline operations, and expense reporting is of no exception. All the manual errors should be identified at an early stage and sorted out properly. AI can weed out policy violations and duplicate expenses quickly.
AI can help get your work done quickly – for instance, when you have unsubmitted reports, AI can get your job done through voice commands.
Digital money
Businesses are moving away from cash transactions to keep up with the trend. Taking a digital approach to money offers several other advantages. Advance payment methods such as corporate cards for travel or spending purposes gives finance departments more control over the money spent. This gives you complete visibility into how much employees are spending and for what purposes. Most importantly, once the feeds from these cards are fetched into the expense solution, they can be reconciled with expense entries, saving employees, and auditors’ time. Also, this ensures lesser chances of duplicate expenses.
Advanced analytics
Finally, the goal is to turn all the data into information and insight. Data is the key to expense reporting as it helps you make critical decisions in the things you want to control.
Expense report solutions help businesses define clear policies while cutting down unnecessary spending. Analytics can help to identify violations and reconcile expenses.
Integrations
When applications work with each other, the result would be greater than what was expected. It can be time-consuming to switch between the applications to create travel requests, request for advance amounts, file expenses, reconcile with credit card feeds, add them to a report and submit for approval. All this would be even easier when you submit from a unified interface so all the data can be automatically synced between the systems. An integrated expense reporting software such as SutiExpense can make this possible by allowing users to integrate with hundreds of other applications. Users can seamlessly switch between the applications, so you don’t have to worry about data entry.
Conclusion
These new and upcoming trends make the expense reporting process completely automated, integrated, and data-rich.
