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3 Benefits of Automating Expense Report Processing for Growing Businesses
For small to mid-size businesses, having an entire department, or even a single employee, devoted to travel and expense management might seem unnecessary. If you only have a few dozen employees, for example, and they’re not traveling that often, it makes sense to just hand expense report processing over to someone working with other financial processes.
When employees are dealing with travel and expense (T&E) on top of all their other work, though, it’s easy for expense reports to get pushed onto the back burner. As your business starts growing and more employees travel, that can quickly become a problem. If report processing is delayed, then employees aren’t being reimbursed for their expenses quickly. And if someone is rushing to finish expense reports, there might not be time for auditing the reports to catch errors, fraud, and other issues.
As organizations grow, scaling office processes is often something you don’t think about until there’s a problem. Suddenly, you have employees in the financial department swamped with work and employees filing expense reports impatiently waiting for payment. If that happens, what options do you have for taking control of processing and auditing your company’s T&E reports?
What Is an Expense Report Audit?
An expense report audit checks your company’s expense reports to ensure that everything is in order. This involves making sure that employees submit all the receipts and documentation for a report, that the person approving reimbursement records everything correctly, and that everyone follows company policy. It helps your company catch fraud or errors and identify steps you can take to prevent future issues.
You can either conduct an audit internally to check expense reports or hire another company to do an external audit. Automation software makes it much easier to track the data necessary for an easy and accurate audit, whether you opt for an internal or external audit.
Outsourcing or Automation
Streamlining expense reports is easiest if you use business process automation software and/or outsourcing to handle the process. Both options make it easy to handle T&R reports and reimbursement. Automation lets you keep the process in your company by giving employees the tools they need to effectively process reports. Outsourcing turns the process over to a third party, which handles the reporting and reimbursement process on behalf of your company. NextProcess offers both.
Our Travel & Expense automation software helps you internally handle T&E more efficiently. Our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model provides your financial department with increased oversight and the tools it needs to quickly and efficiently process requests. It also makes filing expense reports easier for employees.
T&E software is a great option for many companies, but not for everyone. Outsourcing is a good option if you don’t want to keep your expense reporting in-house. Maybe your business is small enough that you don’t have employees available to focus on handling expense reports and can’t hire anyone new right now. Or perhaps you want to reduce the risk of fraud by having an impartial third party handle expense report auditing. NextProcess can help with that, too.
Benefit 1: Automated Policy Compliance
Continual oversight is the most reliable way to catch or prevent expense report fraud and enforce company T&E policy. This level of oversight is nearly impossible when using a paper system. Implementing T&E automation software makes auditing expense reports much easier.
Automation software makes it easy for employees to upload receipts and automatically enforces spending policies. With SaaS software, you can customize the way the software works to match your company’s policies. The software also tracks all the data related to expense reports so it’s easy to double-check any suspicious transactions.
Outsourcing expense report processing, or even just the auditing process, to a trusted third party can help even more. To ensure full policy compliance, segregate duties by hiring a third party to audit expenses. NextProcess’s Expense Report Audit Services follow your policy to the letter and interact with the expense reports without bias.
Benefit 2: Faster, More Accurate Reimbursement
Another advantage of automating or outsourcing expense report processing and audits with NextProcess is quick turnaround. Automation speeds up and streamlines the process of submitting receipts, verifying expenses, and issuing reimbursements.
You can quickly verify the accuracy of expense reports using our expense report auditing service. Pay your employees in a timely fashion—and know that you’re paying them for legitimate expenses—with our reliable expense report processing. This improves employee satisfaction without placing any burden on your company.
Benefit 3: Auditing Scaled to Your Needs
One of the big benefits that SaaS software offers to growing businesses is that it scales so easily. If you suddenly need to process more financial transactions, you don’t have to worry about upgrading the software or buying new user licenses. The software company handles all updates for you, and a transaction-based pricing model means you simply pay for what you need each month.
Ideally, you’ll want to audit every expense report filed with your financial department. This provides the greatest insight into T&E patterns within your company. You can also have an outsourcing company audit a smaller percentage of expense reports based on your criteria. With NextProcess, you always maintain control over how our auditing services scale to your needs.
If you’re interested in taking charge of your T&E processes, schedule a consultation today. We’ll answer any questions you have and provide a free demo of how NextProcess’s business process automation and/or outsourcing can work for your growing business.
