How Expense Reimbursement Software Helps You Clear the Chaos

Expense reimbursement is often a chaotic process in many organizations. With paper and paper work piling up on their desks and the pressure of deadlines growing, many finance executives won’t be able to give each expense report more than a cursory glance before releasing the payment. This introduces the risk of out of policy reports going through, or worse, reimbursement fraud. In this post, we’ll see how online expense reimbursement software helps clear this chaos.

Implement a process: First and foremost, expense reimbursement software helps you define and implement an expense reimbursement process. One source of chaos is the fact that most organizations don’t have standardized expense reports or clearly-defined approval flows which in turn lead to irregular expense reports and sub-optimal workflows. With this software, though, you can clearly define your expense reimbursement process and enforce your reimbursement policy.

Flexibility: Many times, employees submit expense reports that have errors or inconsistencies. In such cases, the accounting executive has to alert the employee who then prepares a new report, sends it for approval, and forwards it to the accounting executive once again. If all these steps don’t happen in tandem, payment cycles suffer. With this software though, reporting is flexible. Employees can immediately edit any report and send it online for approval. The supervisor’s approval immediately forwards the report to the accounting department. Also, approval flows could be customized too, which means that in the absence of one supervisor, the report can immediately be forwarded to another so that payments don’t get delayed.

Fraud detection: This software helps with fraud detection too. Apart from verifying line items, it also examines every report for possible duplicates and notifies the supervisor/accounting executive if any such duplicates exist so that they can investigate the issue and take corrective action.