3CX simplifies employee expense management with Fyle

What was their expense reimbursement process like?

3CX develops an easy to use and manage communications solution. The same could not be said for their expense management which was all paper and spreadsheet-based. Operating on a traditional expense management system came with its customary set of challenges for people who had to claim their reimbursements. This also posed as a challenge for the finance team who had to approve them.

So being an innovative company in its field 3CX needed a piece of software that was easy for their traveling employees to use and would also help boost productivity by eliminating tedious time-consuming tasks.

Why was this difficult for the finance team?

1. The biggest problem was that there was no way to track and monitor business expenses in real-time. The existing manual process offered very limited transparency into the expense activity of 3CX’s employees and was an unreliable method to monitor expenditure.
2. Since the process was heavy on manual work, this led to errors that further complicated the expense reimbursement process. They also wanted to cut down on the time it took to reimburse their employees.
3. Checking for policy violations also had to be done manually, which was tedious and time-consuming. This meant that unapproved expenses slipped through sometimes.

Why did employees find manual expense reporting difficult?

1. According to Alice Karlson, Accounts and Operations Manager, receipts were very prone to misplacement while on the road. She wished that employees could at least file expenses then and there so they wouldn't have to worry about keeping track of all that paper because lost receipts meant lost money.
2. Employees also didn’t have a way to track how much they had left from their daily allowances on trips, which sometimes resulted in overspending.
3. Cash advances and return payments took a long time to be processed. A common complaint from employees was that their expenses needed to be converted back to Euros.
4. Doing this manually was an annoyance, and was also prone to errors.
5. Employees also felt that they were spending way too much time on expense reports.

The finance teams’ search for a solution

The finance team was done with manual processes. Clearly, spreadsheets and papers were not cutting it. They were in the market for an expense management software that made it easier for their employees to claim their reimbursements. They wanted to process expense report claims faster while being transparent about the process. It did not make sense for them to spend a lot of time manually checking for policy violations - something they were obligated to do with the spreadsheet-based system.

They also wanted their employees to have greater control over how and where to submit their expense reports and reduce expense reporting frustrations. That’s when they chose Fyle.

Building a transparent reimbursement process

Alice Karlson, Accounts and Operations Manager

Alice says Fyle as an expense reporting software gave the finance team one central place to manage all their expenses, and they could so do transparently with clear expense policies because:

1. Employees could be notified if their claims are out of policy right when they tried to file it.
2. Since each policy was clearly communicated employees knew exactly what the policy was. This improved transparency and trust in the company.
3. Policy claims previously had to be manually checked. Now policy checks happen in real-time which meant a lot of saved time and effort.

The benefits didn’t stop with the finance team either. Giving their employees an easy way to file their claims made sure that tracking and monitoring expenses became so much easier. There was a considerable improvement in the turnaround times for processing reimbursement claims. As a result, employee frustration declined drastically and expense management was no longer a thing to worry about.

Better employee experience with faster reimbursements

The employees could file receipts from wherever they were, and the problem of losing receipts was a thing of the past. Employees no longer had to waste time collecting, storing, and recording paper receipts. And the best part was that they could track their daily allowances on trips and avoid any nasty surprises.

With an expense management software, the Finance team did not have to waste time converting currencies back and forth - everything was done automatically through Fyle. Even if they encountered internet issues- this wasn’t a problem because they could still Fyle expenses offline too.

Saving time for more impactful tasks

The biggest time saver was the actual filing of expenses. Before they had to go through their receipts manually and fill them up in the sheet. Now all they had to do was to click a picture of their receipt or file it directly from their inboxes with no more manual data entry.

The second biggest time-saver was generating reports - it took a long time to compile all the claims and put them into a report. Now that everything was already in one place, all they had to do was to just generate a report automatically from the dashboard, and it was all done.

An intelligent expense management platform

Alice says that it is now so much easier to monitor and track expenses because they got all their travel expenses in one place, and also that it was a breeze to use, because of the simple, easy-to-use interface.

Zina Ellidou, Bookkeeper & Office Administrator, says that Fyle has helped the finance department simplify and optimize employee expense management. They were able to do this by reducing turnaround times and errors caused by paper processes and mitigated fraud by ensuring all expenses were compliant with corporate travel and expense policy.