Why Effective Receipt Management is Imperative for Every Organization?

Every organization incurs some or other kinds of expenses while managing its operations. Usually, these expenses will be directly spent from the organization’s funds. However, there are a few cases where employees will spend their money for the company and submits expense receipts to reimburse their expenses. Receipts hold great value in expense management as these can help you resolve issues in case of errors or other expense-related issues.

Especially for the employees, receipts are extremely important as without receipts, they can’t claim their expenses. Receipts act as proof of the expense and recording them will help for audit purposes. When it comes to enterprises, receipts are extremely important for auditing and tax filing purposes. They can reduce the pain of filing tax returns and also helps to verify data accuracy and verify the company’s financial health.

In this blog, we have discussed the reasons why most employees of the organization hate expense reports and how businesses can make them work with expense reports effectively.

Why do Business Travelers and Finance Team Hate Expense Reports?

Employees are required to submit expense reports along with supporting receipts to claim reimbursements for their business travel expenses. Reports should include all the necessary details, such as vendor name, item price, date, etc. Reimbursement claims without supporting receipts and receipts with incomplete data can reduce the chances for claim approval. Therefore, employees usually spend hours of their valuable time just searching, collating, storing, and submitting receipts. This process is tedious for the employee, with little to no direct benefit to them at all.

Even though employees tend to stay compliant with the company’s expense policies, there are a few cases where they may file non-compliance expense reports, due to which they are ineligible for reimbursement. Most employees don’t have a clear understanding of the company’s expense policy. Plus, there are a few employees who even keep expense reporting for the last-minute, which causes process delays.

The chances of losing receipts increase with the delay in expense reporting and hinder the accounts team’s ability to keep track of expenses. After receiving the report from the employee, they need to verify the details against supporting documents to ensure all the expenses are in compliance with the company’s expense policy. The process of collecting, storing, reviewing, and approving expense reports with manual, paper-based processes is tedious and time-consuming.

How to Simplify the Receipt Management Process?

Collecting, organizing, storing, tracking, and managing receipts is essential for every organization. But it can be a challenging task for the procurement teams as it invoices various time-consuming steps. Fortunately, automation technologies have been transforming the way procurement teams manage their tasks. Businesses can relieve their employees and approvers from the burden of manually filing, collecting, reviewing, and approving expense receipts with automation.

The introduction of the receipt management solution helps to streamline the tedious tasks involved in the expense reporting process and makes the receipt management process easier. It provides employees and businesses with the features and functionality they need, such as a mobile application that allows them to capture and store receipts on-the-go, OCR technology that can automatically extract the crucial data from receipts and eliminate the manual data entry process, and more. This helps employees to cut out unwanted frustrations of storing paper receipts till the report submission data.

The majority of the receipt management solutions available today in the market also provide the flexibility to integrate with third-party accounting solutions. With this feature, employees can create and submit expense reports directly from the expense application itself. This integration ensures that all the supporting documents are duly included with the expense report and helps the employees to claim reimbursements with ease. The integrated software also provides a copy of every expense report to the finance team and makes it easier for them to manage the company’s financial health more effectively.