Expense automation: how to automate expense reports and approvals

We’ve listed our 10 favourite spend management platforms in another post. When your team members find themselves paying with their own money, the last thing you want is to then make the experience worse with slow paperwork. According to the Global Business Travel Association, it takes 20 minutes to fill out a single expense report.

• Using this technology, a business can prevent fraud and errors, saving the organization from greater financial losses and working to increase overall cash flow.
• Automated expense management allows you to track purchases at the organization in real-time.
• Approved expense data is automatically synched with the accounting system.
• The technology allows for customizable approval workflows and ensures expenses go through the appropriate channels for authorization and review.
• Making expense reports might seem fairly a straightforward process yet it is anything but simple.

Keys to good expense automation

Once they are freed from boring, repetitive activities, they get to spend more time on strategically important work that adds value to the business. When you have a clear understanding of the process that needs to be automated, you will have a clear understanding of the technological needs. The right solution must be cost-effective, scalable, and powerful enough to meet your expense management requirements. Best of all, companies can integrate the software with their finance solutions. This can help Accounting keep better track of compliance and prevent fraudulent expenses.

Choosing an Expense Management Automation Solution

Regardless of size we always review all meeting details to ensure a seamless execution. Our team of experienced specialists work behind the scenes to ensure that your specific meeting, event or conference leaves a positive impression. Send payments to 195 countries in over 40 currencies and reimburse employees in their local currencies within 2 days. Easy-to-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. And since e-receipts are now legal in much of Europe, you won’t even have to digitise your old bits of paper. There’s plenty of room for error, and also a lot of double-handling of receipts.

Features of Automated Expense Management Solutions

With expense automation, the turnaround time for reimbursements is quick and easy. This efficiency is due to the software’s ability to instantly verify and approve expenses, eliminating lengthy manual reviews and paperwork that no one likes to do. The biggest headache for employees and finance teams https://www.bookstime.com/ is the end-of-the-month rush to file expenses. Sales teams are known to have “expense report parties” – whole afternoons full of nothing productive, just filling in forms. Not the average employee, who has to spend hours at the end of the month finding receipts and checking credit card bills.

Automated expense management increases productivity for both the employee and the finance managers. For example, an employee uses their money to fulfil expenses on a business trip. Meanwhile, their personal finances are disturbed as they might have to pay their rent or other bills with that payment. In the case of expense requests being accepted, they are forwarded to the accounts team for payment and auditing purposes. Using automated tools can also help organizations make spending decisions smartly. Moreover, it can help them maintain accountability by allowing them to handle expenses accurately.

• As per the Global Business Travel Association, 19% of all expense reports contain errors and it takes an average of 18 minutes to correct each expense report.
• Expense management solutions can enforce company expense policies by automatically checking these charges against predefined rules and thresholds.
• The manager can receive and improve expense requests instantly with expense management automation.
• As a leader in your business, chances are you are more focused on bringing in revenue than dwelling on the ins and outs of an administrative process like expense management.
• No data entry for your finance team, and no need for complex expense policies.
• Try Zoho Expense for free today to automate and simplify your expense management processes.

Why you should automate the expense management process

We ask employees to pay with their own money, then effectively punish them further with paperwork just to get their money back. These were some of the many factors you should consider when looking for automated expense management software. Also, you’ll learn not every solution is right for your company and not all of them are the same. You must choose the solution according to your requirements and the size of your company.

Employees and managers should have deeper visibility into the expense as it happens. This improved visibility creates accountability and empowers managers to oversee their team’s spending habits in real-time. The need to wait until the end of the month, quarter or end of the trip to submit expenses is eliminated by using an automated expense management system.

Even if errors occur, your finance manager can trace them back to their origin, which is often impossible with paper records. When you are making expenses on so many different levels, the security expense management automation of the company’s money can become critical. It is crucial to go for an automated expense management solution that offers full-fledged real-time security for your expense management processes.

Over 51,000 companies of all sizes benefit from Concur Expense

The other aspect to consider is that employees spend more time on paper form filling and tracking and updating expense data, as a result, they get less time to work on their tasks. When the time spent on productive work comes down, then overall productivity in the organization also comes down. Employees can enter wrong numerical values while filling out the expense report, and the accountants can also commit errors while updating the accounting information. Oversight errors are common because the numerical figures on manual receipts and bills may not be very clear. Software solutions are used for automating most of the tasks in the expense management process. This is by far the most efficient and error-free way to process expense claims.