Every time your employees go outside and spend money for work purposes, it costs your company. That’s the easy part. Calculating the hidden costs, however, is a different story.
If your business still uses a difficult equation of manual expense management, then it’s never going to add up. It only equates to disgruntled staff, a heap of hidden costs, and wasted time. This is where good expense management automation software becomes beneficial in streamlining your employees’ workflow and reviewing overall business expenditures.
This article discusses some of the benefits of using an expense management automation solution for your business.
- Eliminates Confusing Paperwork And Manual Reporting
With automated expense management software, there’s no need to keep a paper record of expenses, or spend hours creating and editing spreadsheets with several formulas.
With a manual process, your employee will need to keep track of paper receipts. Then, your finance team reviews, verifies, and approves the expense reports. This can take time and leave plenty of room for errors.
With an automated tool, like Divipay’s expense management software, you don’t have to deal with paperwork. Employees simply need to capture their receipts with their smartphones, and upload them to the system. From there, your employees can quickly compile their expense reports and submit them to the finance department.
And, even if an error is made, the admins can quickly trace it back to where it occurred, unlike with paper records.
- Faster Approval And Reimbursement
Using expense management automation software speeds up both expense approval and reimbursement. As mentioned previously, it takes too much time in reviewing and approving each expense report with a manual process. The longer it takes to approve an expense report, the more delayed employees are reimbursed.
Reliable automated software can handle the approval process, passing it seamlessly to every approver in line. Once all needed approvals are collected, the finance manager can review the report and reimburse the expenses right away.
- Increased Spend Transparency
Other than being time-consuming, manual expense management also lacks transparency into business expenses.
While you can use paper reports and spreadsheets, data are often outdated by the time you review them. A basic accounting software can help in automatically generating reports. However, without the current expense data, it won’t provide you with a complete picture of what your business’s spending actually looks like.
And, even if your accounting team goes through everything every week and provides a report, it still won’t be enough to make informed and quick decisions.
The best expense management system can provide you with an extensive library of report options, from business trips and daily expenses to reimbursements and policy violations.
You can generate a categorized expense report to see patterns in business and employee spending. Beyond allowing for quick and well-informed decision making, these reports can make it easier for your finance team to narrow down to the best service providers for business trips, such as hotels and airlines. Thus, it allows you to find the best deals for cost savings.
- Put A Stop To Expense Fraud
Manual expense management makes your business prone to expense fraud or theft. Employees can round up mileage expenses or submit the same receipt twice. It’s difficult to control things as such with manual processing since it’s also difficult to determine the suspicious claims and follow up with an employee to resolve issues.
An easy solution for this is to automate your expense management. With an automated expense management software, you don’t have to worry about duplicated entries, automatically notifying the submitter to have them either delete or merge duplicated entries.
Not only that, but it also helps in changing employee behavior by controlling unauthorized spending. By establishing and enforcing business policies and spending rules within an automated expense management solution, businesses can create an effective tool to educate employees on what they can and can’t spend, and with whom.
If an employee attempts to submit an expense outside of these internal policies and rules, they will receive instant notification of the violation. For instance, functionality can be set to immediately notify employees when a meal or hotel rate is beyond the spending limit or not with an authorized vendor.
The policy is communicated consistently and immediately, which helps in changing both intentional and unintentional fraudulent behavior.
Takeaway
As businesses try to grow more revenues from quarter to quarter, expense management automation is a key to significantly reducing and controlling your organization’s second largest cost—employee work expense.
An expense management automation provides a strategic opportunity to create significant improvements in your business money handling.
