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Monday, September 7, 2015

Expense Management for Fast, Easy, and Convenient Reporting

When it comes to business it is always part of the job that might business travel is part of it but somehow most of the employee are having the hard time with in this situation because a lot of things that might go wrong in the moment. Managing travel and expense is hardly an easy exercise in practice. Many firms face lots of obstacles and bottlenecks in the process. In this article, we'll see how expense report software helps with the navigation of these and makes the process easy, fast, and convenient.

Managing travel and expenses is a fairly common activity in any firm. After all, in every firm, there are employees who travel to further the firm's business and the firm has to pay back the money that the employees had spent. While it might look like a fairly simple activity in theory, it is not the case in practice. There can be lots of bottlenecks and obstacles in the process, sometimes due to the nature of the process and sometimes due to manual error. Deploying online expense report software can clear these bottlenecks and help make the firm's travel and expense management function fast, easy, and convenient.

Before we discuss how, let's see a few cases where bottlenecks are usually formed in the travel and expense management process. One of the biggest bottlenecks is approvals, either pre-trip or post-trip. The employee must prepare either a tentative expense report if it was a pre-trip approval or submit the actual expense report if it was post-trip approval. These reports have to be approved by one or more supervisors. Without custom-built software, the routing of these approvals creates bottlenecks as supervisors can take more time than necessary. In such cases, the reporting process slows down.

Another activity that creates bottlenecks is auditing. Whenever employees submit expense reports and receipts, the concerned professionals have to audit these expenses by matching them against the receipts. This is an important activity as, without this step, there is scope for expense claims with lots of inconsistencies and mistakes to be processed. Auditing expense receipts manually can waste a lot of time for everyone involved. After all, each expense report has multiple line items, and matching these line items with individual expense receipts is a highly time-consuming task.

Another cause of these obstacles is the lack of a clear, stated policy for expense management. Without a policy, it is hard to standardize the process; employees will follow their own methodologies. If one employee submits the expense report in a format not being followed by the firm, and claims that he can do so because there are no guidelines on the kind of format, processing such claims takes a lot more time. These obstacles and bottlenecks can be successfully navigated by deploying online expense report software. It optimizes the approval workflow routing so that no bottlenecks are created anywhere in the process. No matter the number of supervisors who have to approve the request, the software ensures that the process is done in the most optimal way.

Auditing receipts using software actually saves a lot of time and effort for the auditing authority as opposed to doing it manually. The software comes with integrated modules which support this exercise.

It also makes the employees follow the firm's travel and expense management policy. The firm's administrators can control the format of the reports and the line items so that they are standardized for everyone. Apart from the above, it also has analytics and reporting capabilities which help with making the process easy, convenient, and fast.

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