Potential Risks Of Not Automating T & E Expense Reporting Process

Automation can improve financial processes where the mundane, yet most time-consuming processes can be handled by technology. You may experience problems at all stages of processing and time-consuming task can delay the reimbursement process and increase the money your company spends on expense reports.

There are several disadvantages that a business can face by not automating the process of expense management:

Loss of Time and Money

Although employee expenses are reported promptly, reviewing policy violations, correcting errors and approving the requests will take time. However, with automated expense report system, most claims move to the approval phase quickly without requiring human intervention or approval. This makes things easier for employees submitting reports as well as for processing expense reports.

Cost of expense report processing reduced by half with finance automation systems such as QuickBooks.

Fraud and Error Risk

Expense fraud costs businesses around $2.8 billion every year and much of this can be avoided by minimizing the potential for false, duplicate expense claims to be submitted for approval. Corporate policy can monitor and avoid the expense report submission that are not eligible for reimbursement and can identify if a receipt is duplicate. Integrating expense report solutions with corporate card programs can strengthen the company’s ability to fight fraud.

Lack of Insights

The greatest benefit that expense report systems can have on the bottom line is the ability to analyze thousands or millions of expense data points, to spot trends and identify areas of inefficiency. The analytics capabilities offered by expense report systems provide real-time insight into the expenses from flight transactions to travelers’ out-of-pocket purchases and can present the data in dashboards, which allows the finance departments to make informed decisions on organizations spend.

Lack of Compliance

While some travel areas are easy to track and enforce, there are other areas such as per diems or flights, which can be time-consuming to verify when entered in a spreadsheet. Company-specific guidelines such as flight bookings can prove tough to enforce and often overlooked by the administrative staff. Finance automation systems can increase compliance within the business and avoid fraud from being committed.

Outdated Business Systems

Spreadsheets would result in late submission of receipts, lengthy approval processes that hinder the updation of business systems, which can be used to analyze expenses incurred. With automated systems such as expense management software, one can easily simplify the process with seamless integration, resulting in a more data-driven approach.

Ofcourse, the reasons for why and how companies can benefit from expense automation are countless – expense software can automate the process of recording to reporting. Any business traveler will agree that submitting expenses with receipts and spreadsheets can be daunting.

Employee satisfaction would result in better productivity; therefore, automating the process of expense management can help make the process straightforward.