3 Reasons Why Organizations Should Ditch Expense Spreadsheets

Although many enterprises are gradually switching from spreadsheets to online expense report software, still some organizations are relying on manual processes for expense management. The reasons for this are many – maybe they think switching is too expensive, working with spreadsheets is easier or the size of their company is too small. While these reasons may seem valid, they are missing out on many financial and operational benefits that expense automation offers to businesses. Also, they have to realize the potential pitfalls of employing manual processes.

Let’s take a look at the most critical reasons why companies should switch from manual processes to expense software:

Slow Processing, High Admin Costs

Processing expense reports manually would cost more than $26. Manually entering the details into the spreadsheets, verifying and then approving expense reports is a highly intensive process. Doing paperwork every time an employee submits an expense report makes the process more hectic, thus slowing down reimbursement process. In addition, your resources have to invest most of their time in reconciling expense reports against receipts, which would further delay the reimbursement process.

Expense Fraud Can’t be Avoided

Employee submitting fraudulent expenses is one of the biggest concerns for many organizations when it comes to expense management. When you take a manual approach to expense management, it becomes easy for employees to commit fraud and employers will find it hard to differentiate legitimate expenses from fake expenses. Organizations have to manually verify every expense before approving, which would not only take hours of your productive time but also results in an inefficient process. Most importantly, validating expense reports becomes extremely difficult.

Enforcing Compliance is Difficult

While tracking compliance is easy in some areas, there are many others, such as per diems, flight booking, and accommodation for which limitations apply. Enforcing these limitations will become difficult when relied on a spreadsheet. Certain company regulations such as booking flights less than 14 days can be a headache to enforce manually. All these can often be overlooked by the admin department, which would cost around hundreds to thousands of dollars to companies. Poorly enforced travel compliance would pose pertinent challenges to the organization, resulting in poor cost control. In addition to offering cost-saving benefits, automated online expense report software can deliver wide array of benefits, ranging from company policy enforcement to the ability to figure out opportunities for cost reductions.

Deploying expense software can help organizations overcome these challenges with its comprehensive analytics and tracking features.