COVID-19 has brought significant changes to the way businesses function. While corporate travel has come to a halt, companies are now incurring new types of business expenses owing to the remote work scenario.

The current pandemic has heightened economic and financial uncertainty. But two things remain constant - expenses and taxes. 

While some businesses still hang on to the manual processes that slowly damage your bottomline, others are quickly switching to automated expense softwares like Fyle. 

As your business tries to adapt and respond to the changes, do you have an accountable plan in place to save costs? Here’s everything you need to know about how Fyle can help you track, monitor and analyze business expenses.

Importance of an accountable plan

Under an accountable plan, your employees can receive expense reimbursements for business expenses such as rent or mortgage payments, home office expenses, office equipment, utilities, business subscriptions, etc. The refund isn’t part of your employee’s income, and businesses can claim tax deductions. 

But here’s the catch, under an IRS-approved accountable plan:

• Expenses should be business-related- they have to be incurred by the employee while in the company’s service.
• Employees have to return any reimbursement amounts that exceed the employer’s applicable expense within a reasonable period.
• Employees must submit expense reports along with proof of expenses like receipts indicating expense amount, date of the expense incurred, name of the vendor, etc.
  

From the above rules, we can understand that the key to implementing an accountable plan depends on your employees. They have to ensure they record all their expenses accurately, keep track of supporting documentation, and submit it on-time.

But this task can prove to be challenging for your employees, especially with a broken expense tracking system. Therefore, to support your employees, and ensure your business can claim tax deductions with ease, look at the best available solution.

What is the best way to keep track of business expenses?

Tracking business expenses through traditional means such as paper and spreadsheets can be laborious and time-consuming. Not only that, but it can also open doors for inconsistencies and fraud. 

With the latest technology, employers and employees no longer have to dread the task of keeping track of business expenses. An AI-based expense tracker can streamline the entire expense reporting and tracking process. Employees can quickly turn their paper receipts digital with OCR technology and store them in the cloud. Also, converting a physical receipt into a digital one eliminates manual printing and collating of expense reports.

By enabling cloud storage, the finance team can also access these documents from anywhere using any device. Cloud storage reduces redundant manual efforts and saves time and costs as well. Additionally, with features such as a digital audit trail, the finance team can also easily view an expense report's entire history.  Through a business expense software, employees can:

• Sort all their expense receipts under a centralized system.
• Reduce the chances of missing, damaged, or undocumented receipts.
• Submit expense reports along with the supporting documents on-time. 
  

For finance teams, this means they can:

• Easily access both old and new employee receipts from one system.
• Keep a tab of all expense history and business-related documents such as expense reports, invoices, bills, etc.
• Collate all business expense data and stay ready for tax season.

5 easy steps to keep track of your business expenses & tax deductibles with Fyle

An intelligent expense management software such as Fyle can make the life of your employees and finance teams easier. Our expense management software has features like receipt scanning within the mobile app that can make it convenient for employees to submit expense reports on-the-go. An approver of an employee can also use the mobile app to review and approve expenses. 

Additionally, our email add-ons, robust policy check engine, corporate credit card, and accounting software integration makes it easier to track expenses. By storing all the data together, Fyle also uses data visualization to give valuable insights to the Finance team.

1. Store all your receipts digitally
2. Receipts are valuable proof of expenses for businesses. It can help companies to identify taxable and non-taxable expenses. 
3. Receipts help you keep track of deductible expenses so that you can claim all possible deductions. 
4. Also, the IRS requires receipts for any business expenses over $75.
   

If your business is still using a conventional expense reporting process to record business expenses, it can be challenging. Especially with remote working, it can cause frustration and confusion for employees and finance teams. 

1. Record all your business expenses‍

With Fyle, there are multiple ways for employees to report their expenses.

• For fragile paper receipts:

They can use the Fyle mobile app to scan paper receipts. Our OCR technology extracts all the crucial details from the receipts and automatically fills the expense report form. The employee doesn’t need to enter the details, thus reducing human-prone data entry errors. 

• For e-receipts:

We use the same technology to make expense reporting truly effortless for digital invoices and receipts lying in the mailbox. With our Gmail and Outlook add-ons, employees can fyle their e-receipts with just one click. Fyle then scans and extracts all vital details, eliminating the need for manual entry.

But wait! That’s not the only way your employees can submit and store their expense receipts. They can send it via everyday apps like Slack and text messages. With such an effortless expense reporting process, employees will be encouraged to submit all their expense reports and receipts on time. 

2. Design your employee expense report form

A customized expense report for your business can streamline your internal expense management process. With Fyle, you can define categories, expense limits and get merchant details, type of expenses, and more. 

An expense report can help you organize purchases into business expense categories. This can be extremely helpful while writing off business expenses at tax time. You can also use Fyle to set up expense categories and review employee spending trends and patterns. 

Additionally, Fyle also comes with data analytics and a quick and easy-to-understand visualization board that helps identify any potentially risky segments. Finance teams can also view the departments incurring most expenses, check top violators, top spenders, etc. These data insights can help the team with visibility into business expenses to help make better-informed business decisions.

3. Increase employee compliance with real-time policy checks

An accountable plan can help enforce company regulations and help protect your company against any potential fraud. With Fyle, you can ensure all your company business expense policies are implemented and enforced.

Fyle's robust policy engine audits each time an employee submits an expense to ensure fraudulent expenses don't go through. No matter how complex your business policy may be, you can configure all your policies within Fyle. 

With our smart policy engine, violations can be flagged and resolved in real-time. Your team can also set the software's response based on how mild or critical the offense is. For example, for mild violations, the finance team can enable Fyle to auto-flag the violation and notify the employee only. The employee can then correct the issue before moving forward. For critical violations, you can enable Fyle to notify either the approver or supervisor directly. ‍

Track all corporate credit card expenses

Corporate credit cards have become indispensable to most companies. Not only does it make expense tracking easier, but companies can also save through credit card programs.

But there are challenges to managing corporate credit cards. For example, if you lack visibility into employee spending habits, there can be overspending. Also, with multiple cards and transactions, credit card reconciliations can be a tedious process. 

Fyle can ease all your corporate credit card management and tracking problems. We have built Fyle to help your Finance team monitor, control, and reconcile expenses with ease. With our expense management solution, you can:

• Assign corporate credit cards to specific users and keep track of individual expenses. 
• Manage multiple corporate credit card programs no matter which card program your business opts for.
• Automatically match receipts with transactions so that your business stays compliant.
• Save time looking for policy violations in card expenses. Fyle automatically detects any policy violations and highlights it to the user or admin.
• Easily separate personal expenses from business expenses by marking expenses as “personal” while reporting.‍

5. Easily integrate with your current accounting software 

Collating expense data from disparate sources can be time-consuming. With Fyle, you can integrate your bank accounts, corporate credit card accounts, and more to create a seamless workflow. You can also automate your workflows and save time by eliminating manual work such as corporate credit card reconciliations. 

Additionally, with an integrated accounting system, you can:

• Reduce manual data entry

Manually entering data can be a huge waste of time for your finance team. With Fyle as your expense tracking software, you can easily automate and transform your workflows. Simply upload and sync expenses with just one click and keep your books accurate and up to date.

• Get all expense data in one place

By simply connecting Fyle with your existing accounting software, you can easily access employee expenses and data- all under a centralized dashboard. Additionally, our integrations help the finance team get visibility into all expense data without sorting through piles of paper documents.

Why should your business automate expense reporting and tracking?

With your workforce working remotely, it may be challenging to track your business expenses through traditional processes. Not only will it cost additional time and effort for all stakeholders, but it also just doesn't seem workable with the current scenario.

Fyle is built, keeping in mind the needs of employees, finance teams, and management in an expense management process. Here’s how we can help.

Fyle as your automated expense management software

It's a win-win for everyone!

For employees, 

• Employees can report business expenses by just clicking a picture of the receipt. Fyle then auto-populates an expense report, all ready for submission. This helps employees fyle expenses as per their convenience minus all the manual effort. 
• Employees can report all their business expenses using any medium, be it a text message, emails, or Slack to claim their expense reimbursements. 
• They get notified in case of any policy violations or duplicate submissions at the time of expense creation. This helps employees to submit expense policy-compliant business expense reports.
• Employees get full visibility into the status of their expense claims. This reduces the frustration around the process of expense reporting and expense reimbursements. 
  

For Finance teams, 

• With cloud storage, they can view and access all the expense reports with corresponding expense receipts under one dashboard. This helps provide a wholesome picture of the current financial state of your business.
• Finance teams can directly automate reminders for missing documents or to report/review expenses on-time. This saves time spent running behind employees for expense report submissions. 
• Fyle’s features such as real-time policy checks and automatic reconciliation, ensure Finance teams get an error-free and accurate expense reports along with receipts.
  

For management, 

• Even with the entire workforce going remote, they can ensure they have visibility into their system. 
• Managers can view information like department/ projects incurring the most expenses and accordingly tweak and allocate budget. 

With Fyle's expense analytics feature, all the information they need is available and viewable under one dashboard. This ensures you keep track of all your business expenses at all times!

Try Fyle today

If your team is looking for a well-rounded expense management software to tackle modern expense reporting problems, then Fyle is the perfect solution. With Fyle, you can track business expenses while ensuring that it follows your accountable plan. Curious to know more? Schedule a demo with us today to see Fyle in action!