Let’s face it; expense reporting isn’t a task anyone likes doing. 

If you’re still stuck with a manual expense reporting process, chances are your employees are losing out on working hours while your company is losing out on money. 

As per a JP Morgan study, companies with automated expense reporting systems experience a 58% reduction in processing cost compared to companies that use traditional expense reporting means.

This brings us to the argument that an expense reporting software isn’t just a nice-to-have for businesses, especially when looking to save time and cut costs.

But can companies truly benefit from automated expense reporting? Let’s find out!

Why is expense reporting important?

Expense reporting is vital for companies to track and manage their business expenses. They do this by enabling employees to fill out an expense report form that documents all expenses incurred on behalf of the company. Once employees submit these reports, Finance teams verify and approve them to get reimbursed. 

For example, employees can submit an expense report after attending a work conference, driving their vehicle for work purposes, or after incurring any other work-related expenses. An organized record of business expenses also means organizations can itemize business expenses on their tax return. This makes expense reporting an essential step that businesses cannot afford to keep off for another day. 

Expense reporting also helps with: 

• Reimbursing employees faster and appropriately
• Tracking business expenses and corresponding budgets
• Doing taxes properly and ensuring tax compliance
• Identifying financial leaks in the form of overspending or fraud
  

Challenges with traditional expense reporting

Companies manage their employee expense reporting either manually or by adopting tools ​​to do the heavy lifting for them. If your company still deals with expense reports with pen and paper or spreadsheets-based systems, it can result in employees:

• Making data entry errors in their expense reports. 
• Submitting duplicate or fictitious expenses to claim reimbursements.  
• Reducing productivity due to the entire process being very cumbersome and redundant. 
• Losing morale with the loss of money due to missing receipts and delayed report submissions.

For Finance teams, manually managing expense reports means: 

• Receiving expense reports in bulk right before the deadline.
• Spending hundreds of working hours manually checking for out-of-policy violations or expense fraud.
• Not being sure if all expense reports comply with the set expense policies  as minor errors and violations can slip by even with thorough checks. 

But all this can stop. Managing expense reports with smart technology such as an expense report software can make a difference. An expense software helps business owners and Finance teams be aware of tax responsibilities and deductibles, have a bird's eye view of all business expenses and create better budgets. It also enables you to keep an eye out for potential employee expense fraud and company credit card misutilization if ever the situation arises. 

Why should businesses consider automating expense reporting?

Managing expenses manually can take a toll on everything from employee productivity to the company's bottom line. Thus, businesses can eliminate the most painful and time-consuming parts of the reporting process by automating expense reporting. They can also streamline operations, cut costs, and reduce time spent on low-impact manual tasks.

Additionally, with expense management software such as Fyle, businesses can always stay assured that they receive accurate and compliant expense reports from employees.

How employees benefit from automated expense reporting: 

• Easy expense report submissions with close to zero manual efforts
• No need to waste time on collating expense receipts and reports
• Effortless receipt management and no back and forths with Finance

How Finance teams benefit from automated expense reporting: 

• Greater control over the entire operation with effective expense policy enforcement 
• Spend less time manually verifying and validating submitted expense data 
• Gain insights into financial spends, patterns, and trends with advanced analytics 
• Receive IRS compliant employee expense reports on time with zero additional effort

Benefits of automating your expense reporting process with Fyle

If your business has issues revolving around expense reporting, you can solve them by switching to a travel and expense management software. With this software, you’re likely to start seeing a return on investment almost immediately. Use our ROI calculator if you’re curious to know how much you’ll be saving by investing in Fyle. 

In addition to saving costs, you might even find some additional benefits you weren’t expecting. Here are five reasons why automated expense reporting just makes sense. 

1. Reduce manual work for both employees and Finance teams 

For expense reporting, both employees and Finance teams have a crucial role in adding essential expense information to go through with the reimbursement process. From providing expense amounts to providing category and department of spending, businesses need these data points to reimburse employees and stay audit-ready at the same time. 

At Fyle, we understand the process of expense reporting can be challenging, and that is why we built an employee-friendly automated expense reporting software. Fyle provides multiple options through which employees can report their business expenses with just a click of a button. Additionally, our OCR technology accurately extracts expense details from paper receipts and e-receipts. This ensures a seamless automated expense reporting experience for both the employees and Finance teams.

Here’s how employees can seamlessly report business expenses with Fyle

For a paper receipt, employees can use our receipt scanning app:

• Employees simply need to click a picture of the receipts with the Fyle mobile app. 
• Fyle works its magic and accurately extracts details such as amount, vendor name, date, etc., from the receipt. 
• Employees can simply review and press “Save” to save the report or “Submit” to instantly submit the expense report.

For e-receipts,

• Employees can submit expense receipts within their mailbox using Fyle’s email add-on.
• By clicking on the email add-on present in the mailbox, Fyle automatically extracts essential details from the receipt.
• The employee can then review and submit the expense report.

No matter how an expense is fyled, it automatically reaches the approver’s dashboard for approval. Also, all the approved and unapproved expense reports appear in the Finance team’s dashboard to enable real-time insights into financial spends.  

With Fyle, Finance teams can eliminate manually making data entries into their accounting software. For example, if your company uses Quickbooks Online, Fyle lets you export all the expense reports with a single click. The reports and receipts are then synced with the appropriate Quickbooks Online categories and users.

2. Keep track of all your business expenses

One of the biggest challenges in manual expense reporting is keeping track of all business expense-related documents, such as reports, receipts, invoices, and bills. These documents are essential both for reimbursement and auditing purposes. But with manual expense management, it can be challenging to manage all the documents with ease.

Fyle and its cloud receipt management feature allow employees and Finance teams to store all documents in a centralized system. So, when an employee submits or updates an expense report, it gets automatically uploaded to a centralized storage space.

Additionally, through a unified storage system:

• Employees can manage their receipts without losing or misplacing them.
• Finance teams can view all company-wide business expenses via the Fyle dashboard. 
• Approvers and Finance teams can also access all employee business reports anytime from any device.
• The Finance team can track the status and progress of all employee expense reports.
• All stakeholders can gain visibility into the expense reporting process.

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SUGGESTED READS:

5 Benefits of using a cloud based expense management software

The real benefits of using an expense reimbursement software in 2022 

3. Remind employees to take action

Delays and last-minute submissions are common in the manual expense reporting process. It can be due to employees forgetting to submit or review reports or Finance teams going back and forth with employees. This can cause employees to miss out on reimbursements or the Finance teams to waste productive hours chasing employees.

Fyle is built to make your teams more productive by freeing up time they would have ideally wasted in back and forths with Finance teams. Fyle’s dashboard also empowers the Finance team to have a bird-eye view of the entire expense management process. This ensures your business stays compliant and audit-ready at all times with little to no extra effort! 

Here’s how Finance teams can simplify expense reporting with Fyle

• Finance teams can view all unreported expenses and pending reports for review or payment under a unified dashboard. 
• Finance teams can set auto-reminders to remind the right person to take action on time by gaining insights into expense report status. 
• By doing so, Finance teams can avoid the rush towards approaching the deadline and stay audit-ready at all times. 

4. Effectively enforce your company expense policies

According to a report, 

"Nearly half (46%) of organizations report less than a 75% compliance rate with their T&E policy."

Even with a clear and comprehensive expense policy, organizations still find it difficult to gain compliance from their workforce. This can be due to a lack of strong policy enforcement.

Effectively implementing your company's T&E policy is just as important as creating it. That is why Fyle has a robust policy engine to help Finance teams tackle policy enforcement challenges. With Fyle, no matter how complex your business rules, the Finance team can effortlessly enforce it with little to no effort. 

Additionally, Fyle's real-time policy checks mitigate expense report violations. For example, if an employee tries to submit an expense that is against the company expense policy, Fyle auto-flags it to the user for corrections or reasons for violations before submissions.

The Finance team can also configure the action to be taken based on the severity of the violation. For example, if an employee tries to submit an expense claim ten times more than the allowable cost, the Finance team can set Fyle to auto-flag the violation directly to their approver. 

Fyle enforces your expense policies so that everyone is on the same plane. This ensures your employees are more compliant and accurate with their expense reporting. Additionally, your Finance team can spend less time correcting minor errors and going back and forth with employees.

5. Automate your entire expense approval workflow

In manual expense reporting workflows, employees spend a lot of time routing their reports to the right person:

• They can be left going from one desk to the other, trying to get their expense reports approved. 

• Even after a successful submission, employees are left in the dark with no clue about the reimbursement status. 
• This can cause employee frustration and  a dip in productivity and morale.

At Fyle, we’ve built an intelligent expense management software that can automate your entire travel reimbursement process- from creating expense reports to reimbursements. By choosing Fyle as your expense management software, Finance teams can configure the workflow as per the company’s hierarchy and business needs. 

Additionally:

• After setting up the workflow, there’s no need for anyone to look for the right person for approvals or corrections. Fyle automatically routes all expense reports to the correct approver for review. 
• If a report needs corrections, it can be sent right back to the employee with one click. 
• After submissions, employees can have a clear view of the payment status of their reimbursement claim.
• Employees and approvers can communicate and resolve issues under one system, avoiding back and forths and wasting time on such mundane tasks. 

Fyle also comes with a digital audit trail that records the entire history of an expense report right from its creation to payment. This ensures proper documentation of every step involved in the expense report cycle. 

Pick Fyle as your automated expense report software

It's time to wave goodbye to your traditional expense reporting system! 

Switching to an automated expense reporting software can help you save time and reduce processing costs. Fyle comes with features such as receipt scanning, real-time policy checks, auto-reminders, and automated workflow setups. These features can eliminate routine manual tasks for your employees while ensuring efficiency, accuracy, and compliance. Not only that, but Fyle also comes with an intuitive dashboard that allows you to access your employee expense reports and have a view of the entire process at all times.

Want to see Fyle in action? Schedule a demo to further understand how Fyle can help with your expense reporting!