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The Best Ways to Simplify Your Expense Reports
Travel and entertainment or travel and expense (T&E) payments account for up to 12% of many companies’ annual budgets. For most companies, managing these expenses involves employees submitting receipts and filling out reports, and then other employees laboriously processing those reports before issuing reimbursement.
It’s essential that you record and manage expense reports carefully, but this is a time-consuming task that many companies struggle with. You can simplify the process and protect your bottom line with these five smart tips.
1) Implement Standard Reporting Procedures
Efficient expense reporting is important to maintaining quality internal metrics and improving employee morale. However, it is often left to grow and evolve on its own without much oversight. If each employee turns in expense reports in whatever way suits them best, you’re probably accepting expense reports in a dozen different formats. While each one may contain the essential information, it will take much longer to process each report. It’s also harder to locate important information when you’re working on your audits or budgets.
Put together a step-by-step guide to collecting and inputting information on expense reports. Clarify exactly what does and does not qualify for an expense report and make sure every employee is collecting information in the same manner. This is especially important in large companies, but it will streamline your business practices even if you’re only collecting expense reports from two or three individuals.
2) Train Employees and Simplify Their Roles
A study by market researcher Ruigrok | NetPanel found that 1/4 of employees who don’t submit expense reports blame their company’s claims process for losing them money. If an employee thinks their employer is making things hard just to avoid paying them back for expenses, you can see how that would negatively impact employee satisfaction.
Once you implement standard reporting procedures, make sure to train employees on how to submit expense reports. Make sure they know you’re standardizing and streamlining things to make it easier for them as well as for the company. Making it easy for them to submit receipts, providing transparency into the process, and speeding up the turnaround time will benefit the company and all the employees involved in expense reporting.
3) Audit Expense Reports Regularly
An expense report audit checks that employees submit all the receipts and documentation for a report, the approver records everything correctly, and everyone follows company policy. Regular audits—internal audits, external audits, or a combination of the two—help your company catch fraud or errors. They can also help you identify ways to prevent future issues.
Ideally, you’ll want continual oversight of the expense report process. This level of oversight is nearly impossible with a paper system, or even a digital system if it isn’t enhanced with optimization tools (more on that in a moment). With Business process automation (BPA) software, though, you’ll have the tools needed to audit expense reports regularly.
4) Turn to Web-Based Expense Systems
BPA software systems like NextProcess offers are increasing in popularity, and for good reason. They’re neater, faster, and more intuitive than an Excel spreadsheet or Word document. They can also streamline and simplify basic financial processes while saving your company money.
A web-based expense reporting system that’s hosted on the cloud is even better. With a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) system, employees can upload their expenses at the end of the day from their hotel room and make them instantly accessible for supervisors to keep an eye on activity. There’s no need for email attachments or a USB drive filled with files. All the information you need is instantly shared and constantly accessible from any computer connected to the Internet. Many cloud-based solutions can also be accessed on mobile devices, making it even easier to submit or approve expense reports.
5) Outsource Expense Report Management
While you can automate many parts of expense reporting, some tasks will always require a human touch, such as auditing documentation. A company like NextProcess can offer a helping hand on an as-needed basis for a quick turnaround and streamlined reporting.
If your staff is struggling to keep up with expense reports, you can simplify matters instantly by outsourcing one or more of these functions. Outsourcing lets you turn over expense report audits to a trusted third party so your company’s employees can focus on tasks other than checking for compliance, tracking down missing receipts, approving expense payments, and auditing the process. You’ll set the policies, and the outsourcing company will make sure that they’re followed.
See How NextProcess Can Help
You don’t have to use your imagination to see how NextProcess’s expense report software can simplify things for your company. Just contact us to set up a free demo. We’ll answer all your questions and give you a first-hand look at exactly how our software would work for your company.
With the proper expense reporting procedures in place, you can make sure all the necessary information is recorded and reported promptly. With this data in hand, travel and entertainment expenses are always readily available, optimizing productivity for your employees on the road.
