Best Expense Management Practices – Part 1

No matter whether you have a stringent T & E policy in place or good expense report software, it’s always better to look for other organizations’ practices and see what others are doing to manage employees ’ spending effectively. This helps you refine your expense management programs and incorporate best spend practices. Best expense management practices have to be defined, implemented and enforced to have a flawless expense reporting process. Here, we give you out the most effective expense management best practices that would be of great help.

Mandate Pre-approvals

Implementing a pre-approval process can reduce the opportunity for over spend, either unintentional or deliberate expense abuse. Preapprovals should work with corporate purchasing card and corporate systems. These systems alerts approvers regarding purchase requests so that they can change dependent on the purchase and as per the company policies.

Execute corporate card program

Companies are embracing corporate card programs as they offer numerous financial and operational benefits. The following are just a few benefits of corporate card programs:

• Get rebates for all purchases

• Eliminates the need for cash advances

• Data entry becomes easy

• Improves accuracy & compliance

• Reduces falsified receipts

Corporate cards offer great convenience when integrated with the T & E system. These cards offer the employee a great level of convenience by automatically downloading the expenses and taking the hassle out of data entry for expense report creation.

Automate policy enforcement

Having your accounts payable department manually review all expense items is time-consuming. By embedding expense policy compliance through a set of rules into the system, all expense line items will be validated upfront against corporate expense, government, and billable policies. With automated expense software, when an employee enters an expense not compliant with policy, that line item will get flagged. Employees will be asked to explain such type of expenses. Finally, approvers can review and remove those expenses from the expense report.