Employee reimbursements

Organizations that value their employees always want to understand how they can shrink their reimbursement cycles. Here's everything you need to turn your expense reporting real-time and make reimbursements pain-free.
Employee reimbursements

The real benefits of using an expense reimbursement software in 2022

August 24, 2020
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4
Min Read

There’s no guesswork involved when we say the nature of business is becoming increasingly unpredictable. In a world where your employees work from the office one day and are home-bound the next, how do you ensure that critical processes like expense reimbursement don’t break? 

How do you ensure your business is compliant with IRS rules and regulations no matter where your accounting/Finance team is located?

Automation is the ultimate solution. It has been, for over a decade now.

However, your automation partner must keep up with global changes in the business world. In this article, we talk about everything you need to know about an expense reimbursement software in 2022 and the benefits of having one in place. 

There’s also a handy checklist for you to understand the right boxes an expense management software should fill to qualify as a worthy investment.

What is an expense reimbursement software?

An expense reimbursement software streamlines and automates all labor-intensive and error-prone tasks involved in the expense claim process. This includes easy submission of employee expense reports, automatic policy compliance, expense claim verification, processing of reimbursements, and receipt safe-keeping in unified cloud storage.

Why is an online reimbursement software important?

Manual, paper-based processes are error-prone, time-intensive, and most importantly, can’t keep up with the pace of businesses today. Your employees, no matter where they are continually striving to meet your organization’s goals, and cannot be tied down with repetitive, unproductive tasks such as expense reporting, approvals, or reimbursements. 

An online expense reimbursement software comes with powerful expense management features that make the major challenges your employees face in the expense reimbursement cycle, a one click deal:

  • Expense tracking and expense report submissions for employees
  • Expense claim verifications and approvals for managers/accountants
  • Searchable, unified expense receipt management cloud with audit trails for every expense/expense receipt for your auditors

    Automation not only saves your employees time but helps your Finance team gain in-depth insight into your businesses’ financial health in real-time. These advanced expense analytics help them identify risks and opportunities and strategize for maximum financial productivity.

Benefits of an expense reimbursement software

A dedicated expense reimbursement software practically pays for itself. Alongside saving your business a ton of time, costs, and staff-hours, it ensures your business is ever compliant - with little to no manual intervention.

If you’d like to check how much your business can save with an expense software before understanding its benefits, here’s a free ROI calculator you can use:

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Happy with what you see? Read on to learn all the benefits of having a dedicated expense reimbursement software.

Quick employee expense reimbursements

An expense reimbursement software comes with a robust policy engine that checks for any corporate/expense policy violations and raises flags before the employee can even submit an expense report. These flags help employees correct any errors before submitting their expense reports, eliminating the endless back and forth between them and your Finance teams for verification and rectification of expense receipts.

As all the heavy lifting in the expense claim process is taken care of by AI, you can reduce reimbursement turnaround time (TAT) drastically while ensuring policy compliance and eliminating expense report frauds.

SUGGESTED READ: Five ways to make expense reporting easier for your employees

Real-time visibility into financial health

An expense reimbursement software tracks business spends as they occur and updates them on your Finance team’s dashboard. With advanced analytics like top-spenders, top policy violaters, weekend or holiday spends, and duplicate detection, forecasting risk and identifying opportunities become highly data-driven with real-time insights for Finance teams.

What’s more? You can view any of these analytics (and more) department-wise, project-wise or org-wise!

In unprecedented times like these, businesses have to track and plan their finances more carefully than ever. In-depth analytics with actionable insights is a real boon for Finance teams and business owners.

Continuous compliance and audit readiness

An expense reimbursement software automates policy checks for your entire organization. If you need different policies for different orgs, departments, or even projects, the software facilitates them as well. Rest assured, be it cash advances, per diems, or expense reimbursements, every transaction you make is compliant.

An expense software also records every action taken on an expense report/expense, creating an audit trail. This, paired with a unified, searchable receipt storage cloud, ensures you have everything you need at the click of a button for audits. This saves your Finance teams and auditors much frustration.

SUGGESTED READ: Expense reimbursement policy best practices for your business

Increased employee satisfaction

According to Villanova University, “Irrespective of job title and pay grade, employees who report high job satisfaction tend to achieve higher productivity.”  
Expense reimbursements shouldn’t stand in the way of higher employee satisfaction and productivity levels, especially in the 21st century. Deprioritizing the most unproductive, frustrating, and recurring task - expense reporting, can help you boost employee morale and help your employees focus on other critical operations.

How do you do that? Look for an intuitive expense reimbursement software that truly automates every step of your expense claim process.

Features to look for in an expense reimbursement software

If your existing expense management software requires your employees to spend more than half a minute to track and report an expense, it’s time you considered a different vendor. 

Here’s a list of must-have features for shortlisting an expense management automation software:

  • Easy expense tracking: Track receipts from within your everyday apps like G-Suite, Outlook, WhatsApp, text messaging, or work-essential tools like Slack.
  • One-click expense reporting: Submit expense reports with one-click from a device of your choice using the mobile app/web app.
  • Accurate mileage tracking: Track and report accurate mileage logs, whether one-stop, multi-stop, or round trip - with a single click.
  • Approval workflow automation: No matter how complex your workflow, feed it to the software, and simplify expense report approvals!
  • Comprehensive expense policy engine: Configure complex policies based on employee or expense parameters and enforce with ease.
  • Automate expense reimbursements: Initiate reimbursements to multiple bank accounts with a click and track payment progress in real-time.
  • Powerful integrations & APIs: Integrate with your existing accounting/HRMS software to facilitate data movement or build custom apps with APIs.
  • Analytics and reporting: Control employee expenses & view expense trends in real-time. Improve financial health with actionable data insights. 

These are the essential features that your ideal automation software must offer to reduce TAT, save costs & staff-hours, and boost employee satisfaction. Further, innovation plays a significant role in understanding how your expense management software can scale with your business.

(Psst! With innovation at its core, Fyle’s expense management features are perfect for businesses of all sizes!) 

Explore everything that Fyle’s intuitive AI can do for you →

Or, say hello, and we’ll walk you through how Fyle can help future-proof your businesses’ expense management system.

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