Managing company finances has always been an important part of the success of the business, and expenses are a major portion of the same. With innovative ways to increase revenue and savings, reducing expenses requires a lot of effort too.

Companies make various business expenses like technology investments, hiring, learning curve, business trips and travel, and other employee expenses of which the finance and human resources department maintains the records. But, maintaining manual expense records is not business-friendly due to:

• High expense report processing costs
• Approval delays lead to dissatisfaction among employees
• Maintaining and storing receipts and data – is time-consuming and needs space
• Long processing time – usually 1-2 months
• Irregularity in following company expense policies at all levels
• Expense receipts frauds
• Use of paper receipts and documentation – non-eco-friendly
• No transparent system of processing expense reports

Hence, technology can resolve these issues in a sustainable manner. With an online expense software, the companies can manage their expense reporting process easily without much manual effort or storage space for receipts. The expense software is a digital expense reporting process that automates the receipt-to-reimbursement journey making it time-efficient and effortless. It eliminates all the risks associated with the manual expense reporting process along with providing the finance and HR team with a focus on operations rather than reporting.

With expense software, you can replace manual expense reporting with digital expense reporting in the following ways.

1. Organizing Receipt Collection

Usually, the employees have to submit expense receipts and fill out the forms every time they make business expenses, and then the whole manual receipts verification process goes by.

But, with expense software, employees can easily upload the captured image of their receipts to the application dashboard from any device, and the in-built OCR technology will verify those by extracting the information from the receipts like merchant name, amount, date, and category. This digital receipt collection system also identifies invalid expenses violating company policies, which prevents employees from even making such expenses.

2. Streamlining Expense Report Approval Process

The expense software eases the expense receipts approval process by automating the workflows to reduce manual intervention and time-taken for approval. You can organize the multi-level workflows as per your organization’s hierarchy, and you can also create separate workflows for different departments.

Also, you can set automatic report submission alerts, and auto-approve or reject reports. For instance, the HR associate can set a condition for expense receipts with more than one policy violation to be rejected automatically. Such a system removes manual approval bottlenecks and saves time for employees and managers.

3. Credit Card Reconciliation

You can also provide a set of limiting conditions with an automated bank reconciliation facility through the company’s credit card. The company’s expense administrators can define the purchasing limits for the assigned credit cards, and card providers can integrate with the expense software application to fetch the real-time card feeds. With this syncing, the transaction information is pulled from the supported bank and displayed on the application dashboard for the employees to claim them as expenses and reconcile the same.

4. Real-Time Expense Data Analysis

Using expense software for reporting expenses, the finance team can access the in-built analytical reports that show real-time visibility and insights into employee expenses at department, project, and organization expense claim levels. This system empowers the finance and hr team to review spending patterns and deploy the analysis reports to higher levels before the full reporting cycle completes, making the budget and funds allocation decisions faster and more precise.

5. Enforcing Expense And Travel Policies

The expense software also gives the finance team liberty to add or modify expense policies, and conditions or limits by which the software verifies every expense claim. You can also define the consequences for non-compliant expenses and policy breach issues.

These in-built features help detect fraudulent expense receipts and mitigate violations effectively.

Conclusion

The manual expense reporting process is time-consuming and has become obsolete in today’s times. With small businesses, or low expense management heads, it is costly to upgrade to expense software, but for large businesses, the online expense software makes the real-time reporting easier, helps in digital receipts collection and verification, automates the approval process, and prevents fraudulent receipts from passing through the system.

David Simson

The author, Dr. David K Simson is a trained radiation oncologist specializing in advanced radiation techniques such as intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT), volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) / Rapid Arc, stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), stereotactic radiotherapy (SRT), stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS). He is also experienced in interstitial, intracavitary, and intraluminal brachytherapy.