The Ultimate Benefits of Expense Report Software
An organization will have around eight to nine thousand travel reports for reimbursement in a year. The biggest challenges of the expense reporting process is timely approval of reports and policy compliance. With the approvers and finance department spread across different business units, it is difficult to track all receipts and spreadsheets while controlling the approval process.
Manual processing makes it difficult to know the status of the approval and forms were floating around internal systems for signatures. This frustrates travelers who were waiting for weeks to get their reports approved. Also, it has lowered the visibility and made reimbursements difficult.
Switching to an automated travel and expense solution not only improves the ability to enforce compliance with travel and expense policy but also streamlines internal processes. The solution allows users to take a snap and send expense receipts directly into the expense system.
You are not required to retain receipts till the end of the trip, thanks to the optical character recognition that eliminated the need to manually enter information such as amount, date and merchant. Also, you can easily combine expense line items with corporate card transactions, so travelers don’t need to spend time reconciling reports with credit card statements.
The system will not only extract the data and populate it into expense reports, by automatically verifying the amount and category against the corporate travel and expense policy, there is no need for users to remember the limits for various line items. The expense policy can be configured into the system when it was implemented and automatically flags a line item if non-compliant.
The user will need to provide an explanation before submitting, which allows approvers to decide whether to approve a specific item. Any issues from approvers are noted in the system and submitters will be notified by emails if there are any compliance issues. With online expense report software, you can approve and reimburse expense reports without any delays in the reimbursement process.
The manual process is very time-consuming and could result in significant delays in the approval process, which frustrates travelers. Another benefit could be the improved visibility that both the travelers and finance department get when submitted for approval. With expense software, travelers can simply log into the expense solution to see the approval status, so you need not track the paper.
Also, approvals can be easily done either through a laptop or smartphone. The travelers know where their documents are in the system, which makes things more efficient, improving end-user satisfaction while minimizing the administrative burden.
