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Adithya Nayak
Adithya Nayak
The occasional intern. The Darryl of the Office. I do have the most common name, but my ideas, well they aren't great either. If I had a dollar for every time, I said sorry, I could open a bank.
Let’s accept it - cash advances are essential. They are issued by the organizations to help cover employee business expenses. In most cases, the forms of payment are limited, yet different. They also are dependent on the expense type and amount. Cash advances specifically help complete minor business operations, where other payment forms are not a viable option.
Some of the business operations that cash advances can help with are:
Daily meals
Local transport
Utilities
Today’s broken cash advance management
Since every organization has multiple projects, business meetings, and travel expenditures, employees receive sufficient funds to cover their expenses. Managing these advances and subsequent expenses is pivotal to the company's accounting.
Improper or traditional cash advance management can expose the company to the following risks:
Open doors for expense fraud due to independently running processes
Leave room for errors and delays in the reimbursement process, due to manual processing
Hamper employee experience due to a crippled process
To avoid these risks, it’s imperative to understand where the problems lie. One major flaw with the cash advance management today is the friction-heavy manual processes.
Employees raise a cash advance request via email or physical paper forms
Managers approve the cash advance request via email or physical paper forms
In case of exceptions, managers approach their higher admins to get additional approvals, causing further delay
Employees are usually in the dark about the cash advances request
Lack of real-time communications regarding payment processing leaves room for hampered employee experience
Lack of information leads to discrepancies in employee expenses reported and the expectations set by the organization
Lack of accounting for non-reimbursable expenses
Additional effort to create independent reports for non-reimbursable expenses
Automation has proven to be a promising solution tosolve T&E challenges that manual processes bring to the table. Cash advance management is no different.
For employers, here are some benefits of automating cash advance management:
Helps organizations close their books on time
Ensures easy refund collection process
Provides end-to-end visibility of non-reimbursable expenses
Eliminates the possibility of expense fraud, owing to duplicate detection through technology