How To Overcome The Challenges In Expense Reporting

The expense management process presents a lot of challenges to businesses. Many organizations process business T&E reporting manually, and as a result, face many challenges in efficiency and control. An advanced expense management system helps overcome challenges, but software selection can be a game of give and take when it comes to capabilities. Here, we list a few key features that a solution you select should offer in order to overcome the major expense reporting challenges.

Visibility

Businesses should understand the current expenses and find trends in order to predict those expenses going forward. Visibility into business spends helps for better planning and budgeting expense management process. An expense reporting system should offer advanced reporting and insights so that when required the appropriate changes can be made.

Accuracy

Research shows that a considerable portion of T&E spend is non-compliant with business policies. An automated system should find those non-compliant claims, search out fraud, and minimize errors on both sides of the process through automation.

Compatibility

The solution should integrate and perform well as expected with the existing business tools. An effective expense reporting system should easily integrate with the right tools. And it should be one that offers travel booking, expense reporting, spend analysis, and employee reimbursement.

Communication

It is very crucial to proactively communicate with employees and their managers using email about prospective T&E issues and their consequent resolution. The applications should provide a set of email templates to communicate a regular message to all employees. All email communication should be stored in a centralized system that can be accessed by all the employees involved in the expense management process.

Mobile Access

Spend reporting requires mobile apps that minimize the delays created when employees hang onto receipts. Mobile applications offer additional savings over traditional office-based tools. A mobile expense reporting system has to offer the same simplicity and ease of use that employees expect from their other mobile apps.

Implementation

There are a number of solutions available in the market developed with your needs in mind making it easy for you to sign up and get started. Select a cloud-based solution that is quick and easy to set up, preferably there should be no configuration or setup charges.

Centralized System

Traditional reporting processes are typically fragmented among various systems including email and employee hard drives. Implementing an end-to-end, centralized system promotes automation, spend analysis, communication, and audit trails.

Security

Manual expense management is not just slow and expensive, it’s less secure. Also, it fails to be compliant with the rules and regulations involved in the expense reporting process. Advanced online systems maintain the entire expense reporting data in the cloud, where they can be secured and monitored.

A robust expense management system that offers advanced tools not only simplifies expense reporting but also helps you analyze how you spend your corporate travel budget.