Pages

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Five Main Reasons Why You Should Use Expense Report Software



Even in this day and age, there are many organizations that manage their business processes, even key processes, the traditional way without taking advantage of technology and the convenience it offers. We still see paper-based reports, long approval cycles, and fragmented data silos everywhere. One business process that will gain a lot from the adoption of technology is travel and expense management. Online expense report software, which automates and streamlines the process, can speed up the process by an exponential factor and help you enjoy a hassle-free business process. Here are 5 reasons why you should deploy online expense report software for your business:

Convenient authorization process: With this software, managers can authorize their employees' travel requests either before or after the trip, depending on the situation. If a sales rep went on a 2-day trip but had to extend it to a 5-day trip, he can get authorization for the 2-day trip before the travel and come back and update the request with the 5-day details. Pre-travel requests can be converted into expense reports with a few simple clicks, eliminating the need for multiple data entries.

Flexible approvals: In some organizations, there might be more than one approver and the approval process follows a pre-defined flow. In some others, there are thresholds set after which the request has to go through multiple approvals. This software can be configured to suit either flow. Email notifications will be immediately sent out to all the approvers as soon as the request is created. The approvers can check the requests for any discrepancies and reject any line items that contain them. A notification is sent to the user who then has to correct the line item and re-submit it for approval.

Integration: This software can be fully integrated with any existing legacy applications and/or third-party applications, be they on-premise or on-demand. Integration with the company's finance application allows managers to quickly export expense reports and make quick reimbursements.

Easy deployment: As this is a SaaS-based application, there is little to no work that has to be done by the organization during deployment. Nor do they have to worry about maintenance, support, or updates, which will all be done by the vendor from his side. This is in contrast with on-premise applications, which needed the IT manager to babysit them.

Reports -- Data to information: Travel and expense management is one of those processes which traditionally do not always stay within the budget and as actual budgets go wrong, it is hard to make forecasts for the future as well. Organizations always had a lot of data to play around with, but no means to structure the data to draw meaningful conclusions from it. With this software, administrators can pull reports on a variety of activities and analyze them to understand the situation and make informed decisions. They can understand which departments are within the allotted budgets and which divisions are overshooting them.

0 comments:

Post a Comment