On a quarterly or monthly basis, they submit individual requests to their team manager. Making expense reports might seem fairly a straightforward process yet it is anything but simple. And, if you still rely on manual processes, it is a headache for everyone involved. You are not only causing waste of working hours for the employees but also the business to do more mistakes, duplication, and loss of productivity.
Top Expense Management Automation Software Solutions
Expenses such as office supplies, travel costs, or professional service fees are often tax-deductible. Accurate and well-organized expense records can help you claim tax deductions on business spending. Expense report automation tools are handy, but virtual assistants will mean that there’s less need for manual work. Instead, you can dictate what you’re looking for and your system will do it for you via virtual assistant commands. One important thing you want to do to manage your expenses better is to make forecasts.
What are the benefits and use cases of automated expense management?
Once the expenses are approved and payments are reimbursed, the details are logged into the company’s accounting system for auditing purposes. Here are a few considerations to help you choose a solid expense management solution and create policies to support it. Old-school processes may get the job done, but they’re clunky, time consuming, error prone, and don’t provide the visibility into spend you need to do your job effectively. https://www.bookstime.com/ Expense report automation software is only as effective as how it is being used. Considering that the bulk of its usage will be by your employees, you need to make sure that you’re providing proper training so that they can use the software effectively. Instead of having to rework your policies entirely to fit your new tools, you’ll want to instead customize your automation software and features to reflect your policies.
Get started with automating your expense management process
Optical character recognition (OCR) will also enhance your receipt management. This means that all your company’s financial data can be safely stored in a single secure system. This significantly minimizes the risk of financial data being lost or misused.
While this is a less expensive way to manage expense reports, paper forms require the time-consuming process of manually logging these reports. Additionally, employees need to keep track of their paper receipts, which could end up lost in transit or be impossible to find again. Now that we are aware of the pitfalls of manual expense management, we should focus on a more efficient and effective way to handle expense requisitions. A comparison of manual expense management systems with an automated expense management system ought to set the stage for adopting expense automation.
- Automation provides realtime insights into your business expenses at any given moment, offering a level of visibility and control that manual processes can’t match.
- It is important to assure that the new system will be easy to use and understand.
- These systems provide real-time data to facilitate quick and intelligent decision-making, with just a few clicks.
- Expensify combines receipt scanning, expense tracking, and reimbursements into one free app.
- It also simplifies the process of filing expense reports and payments, reducing errors and significantly improving accuracy.
The need to spend valuable work hours on painful logging and the process of expense reports is minimized, thus increasing productivity at work. Once the manager has approved the claim, they forward it on to the accounts department for processing. The accounts staff then key each expense item into the company’s finance system before filing the claim and receipts away. In a Software as a Service implementation, these processes are largely automated and the submission and approvals processes are transacted electronically. Expense automation is changing the game for small businesses, finance teams, and anyone who handles expense reports. With automated processes, digital receipt capture, integrations, credit card import, and even travel assistance, handling your money stuff has never been easier.
Choose the right expense management automation tool
The technology helps to strengthen spend management and integrates with existing accounting and ERP systems. A clear map of the process helps you understand existing expense policies and procedures, gather and centralize process data, and set expense management goals. The easiest and most effective way to mitigate expense fraud is to automate expense reports. Fraud or errors can be automatically expense management automation detected by the software and the submitter and approver are automatically notified to resolve the violations. Moreover, tracking and storing paper-based receipts can be a cumbersome process. All the payment receipts, bills, credit card statements, and other relevant documents that can be submitted as a proof of purchase should be diligently tracked and recorded by the employee.