Did you know recent studies suggest the manual expense reporting process costs the company an average of $31, whereas automating the process minimizes the cost to $15?

Clearly, the cost difference is significant when you compare traditional means to a modern expense reporting software. This shades light into the growing need for automated solutions to help address expense management and pre-accounting woes.  As a result, most of the companies have now turned to expense management software. 

Being up-to-date, your company may have decided to adopt an expense management software. But are you aware of some of the best practices around it? Will the expense report software of your choice help ease the burden of the employee’s expense report procedure? And which features can help you get the best results?

Let’s delve in to learn more about how to process expense reports with an expense management software.

3 best practices to process expense reports

Even though companies have different policies and hierarchies, they may have a common reason for adopting an expense management software. For example, to automate manual processes. Companies are actively doing so as they can reduce costs, enhance consistency, improve accuracy, and increase efficiency.  

Pro tip:

Look into immediate networks and top organizations to see what they’re doing to refine their process. This will give you an idea of what to try and what to avoid.

Some of the common practices that world-class organization follows to enhance their expense report process are as follows: 

1. Always try to pick an automated solution 

According to a study by Runzheimer International, 

“The cost of processing for companies using an automated solution is 27% less than companies using a paper-based expense system.”

These statistics only speak for the costs saved. But what about all the other qualitative metrics such as effort, strain, and frustration? The answer to all of these challenges is just one thing - automation. Automation helps eliminate the mundane tasks that bog people down. This helps them save time and energy for efforts that actually matter. 

You can choose to be an employee-centric organization by automating areas that require less intuitive work and more routine manual work. You can automate processes such as manually typing in expense amounts, checking for policy violations, and reminding employees to submit their expense reports. This means that all of this happens in the background with little to no human supervision. Imagine the time and effort you save by just choosing to automate!

Automating an expense report process has several benefits tied to it. Some of the reasons being:

• Business processes are streamlined
• Eliminate the risk of fraud and error
• Credit card reconciliations are made easy
• Errors and policy violations are flagged automatically
• Employees can be reminded to submit their expense reports

• Leverage on the power of mobile technology

Leading companies of today are always on the lookout for employee-centric innovations. These innovations not only improve employee satisfaction but also boost employee morale and productivity. 

Given the rapid increase in mobile devices in recent years, the mobile phone is close to second skin for most of us. Thus, to help simplify the process of expense reporting many softwares also work via phones. 

An app such as a receipts scanner enables employees to scan receipts and report business expenses on-the-go. This decreases the risk of losing receipts, and expenses can be reported on time. 

Getting a timely and accurate mileage log from employees can also be carried out with a mileage tracker app. Mileage tracker apps can be used to track gas mileage and access mileage log and IRS rate for reimbursements. This helps make the reimbursement process to be less of a struggle.

• Ensure your processes and policies scale with you

Keeping a tab on your company’s progress is crucial. With a constantly evolving business, the same processes and policies may not work with the same efficiency overtime. For example, regularly auditing your employee's expenses to ensure honest spending can no longer be done manually. This calls for a modern technology solution.

Keeping an eye on company processes and policies will allow you to:

• Spot any deficiencies 
• Make the process run smoothly
• Change policies to align with the company's growth
• Analyze and improve policies, wherever necessary

SUGGESTED READS:

How to speed up processing of expense reports?

How to review and approve expense reports?

Ease your expense report process with Fyle

Whether it's an employee filing an expense report or an accountant trying to figure out the mess in the numbers, everyone dreads the process of expense reporting.  

It is a tedious task for all parties involved, but it has to be done. Expense reporting cannot be tossed out, but Fyle can make the expense report procedure less painful.

How to process expense reports using Fyle?

• Effortless managing and accessing of all receipts

Losing a receipt means losing proof of expense. It can contribute to delays, errors, and frustrations. With Fyle, physical receipts can be scanned and uploaded. Digital receipts can also be collected directly from your Gmail or Outlook mailbox. 

Additionally, the data from these receipts are accurately extracted and stored in cloud storage. This allows employees to easily report and submit their expenses without any hassles. 

Pro tip:

All the receipts are under unified cloud storage. This means receipts of all employee expenses can be easily searched and accounted for under one dashboard.

• Credit card reconciliation woes are taken care 

Credit card reconciliation involves several routine chores, and no employee would want to spend hours doing such mindless tasks.

With Fyle, most of the credit card reconciliation process is automated. When an expense is made, the receipts are matched with the transactions. Incase of forbidden purchases or policy violations, the error is detected easily. Automatic matching of transactions and flagging of errors trim off unwanted manual work.

Multiple credit cards and cardholders can also be easily managed in one tab. This creates visibility into each employee’s expenditures and spending trend. Thus, credit card reconciliation with Fyle leaves less room for error and more room for productivity.

• Effectively enforce your policies 

Companies spend a lot of their valuable time and resources to carve out a T&E policy to accommodate all business expenses. The primary reason behind this is to try and ease out the expense reporting process for the employees. This can happen only when businesses also take out the time to effectively communicate their business expense policies to the employees. Without proper communication of the policies, all the efforts taken to craft the policy go in vain. 

Fyle provides flexibility to create and integrate company policies. Policies on trip requests, cash advance, per diem, corporate credit card or a simple expense can be enforced seamlessly. Automated policy checks also eliminate the chances of fraud and policy violations. This ensures any and all expenses incurred by your employees are in sync with your policies.

• Staying ready for tax season

To stay audit-ready, the entire process needs to be efficiently managed from start to end. At Fyle, we cut down the tedious task of pre-accounting and help your team stay audit-ready. 

• Documentation of proof of expense is made easy with our receipt management feature. All expenses are recorded and stored in a centralized system. This makes all the receipts just one search away.
• With the help of an automated workflow, tasks are passed on automatically according to custom approval hierarchies. This streamlines and fastens the reporting, reviewing and approving process. 
• With Fyle’s data analytics and customizable policy engine, companies can continuously monitor and optimize turnaround time and other operations. This helps your business save costs and scale.

SUGGESTED READ:

How to leverage business expense report analytics for organizational success?

For an organization, an expense report process need not be a time-consuming procedure anymore. By choosing Fyle, you can speed up expense reporting and streamline your business processes. All this can be done effortlessly while helping your team stay audit-ready at all times. 

With Fyle, stakeholders can submit, approve or verify expenses anywhere, anytime! Schedule a demo to get started today!