Here’s the deal - your employees, whether on-field or in-office, are doing a lot of heavy lifting (literally and figuratively!) They deserve to be reimbursed on time and with utter ease. In this article, we discuss how best to streamline employee expense management in the construction industry.

What is the best way to manage employee expenses in the construction industry?

Employees in construction are spread out in different geographical locations for various projects. Construction companies have to ensure that all expense data from the different sites are: 

• Documented accurately with all necessary information for expense reporting
• Forwarded to the right approvers for expense reimbursements
• Stored securely, and easily accessible for future reference, as proof of expenses
• Made accessible to accountants and Finance teams to make data-driven decisions
  

These tasks are all very labor-intensive, error-prone, and repetitive - all indications that you and your employees shouldn’t be wasting productive hours on them—cue an AI-powered expense management software.

Here are all the ways an expense management software helps streamline and manage construction employee expenses and other job-related expenses efficiently:

Reduce time and effort employees spend on filing construction expense reports

An expense management software allows employees to track and report business expense receipts from wherever they are and from any device of their choice. 

Most expense management software come with a mobile app that allows employees to simply take a picture of a business expense receipt and upload it. The software then automatically extracts all relevant data from the receipt and fills up all necessary fields.

Here’s what’s awesome - you can still use the app to track receipts even when you don’t have access to the internet!
Easy, right? 

Psst! Fyle even allows you to track expense receipts from within everyday apps like WhatsApp, text message, G-Suite, Outlook, phone gallery, and many more! 

Automate workflows and reduce turnaround time for approvals

An expense software facilitates automation of any complex workflow. You can add all necessary stakeholders to a specific project, assign expense/employee parameters and streamline the entire expense approval process with ease.

Approval workflows can be tricky; a specific expense might have to be sent to one approver, whereas the other might have to go to another approver. In such cases, employees need to remember which expense goes to whom. 

For example, there can be certain job-related expenses that exceed a certain set amount. In such cases, the expense report has to be approved by the Project Lead and the Department Head. Once approved by both of them, the expense report would then go to the finance team for the final approval before payment processing. 

An automated expense management software helps set and automate custom approval processes such as these. This ensures seamless expense reporting and tracking, no matter how complex the workflows or policies!

Process multiple employee expense reimbursements from your dashboard

An expense management software allows Finance teams to process expense reimbursements to multiple employee bank accounts with a single click. - all from within your centralized expense management dashboard. 

• If you prefer to process payments through your bank portal, you can directly export all employee and payment information in a bank-friendly format and initiate payments in bulk.
• Suppose ACH payments are your preferred medium for processing reimbursements. In that case, the software lets you verify employee bank accounts, initiate payments via ACH, and track payment progress in real-time. 
  

This feature comes as a bonus for the Finance department - no more processing individual construction expense reports. 

Automatically reconcile corporate credit card expenses

An expense management software integrates directly with your card provider, making clean transaction feeds available in real-time. It also helps eliminate manual linking of transactions to expenses and checking for policy violations. And if you need to reverse a transaction, you can do that too - with just a single click!
With a fool-proof corporate credit card reconciliation process in place, you can issue more cards to more employees, utilize bank credit to improve cash flow and identify risks and opportunities.

Don’t ever let a project stall because of credit card reconciliation discrepancies. 

Integrate seamlessly with your preferred accounting, HRMS, and ERP software

An expense management software integrates seamlessly and fully with your existing accounting, HRMS, and ERP software.

This facilitates the effortless movement of employee expense data in and out of the expense software with little to no manual effort.

Not only does this eliminate data entry errors, but it also reduces turnaround-time (TAT) for processing payments and reimbursements to employees. 

To conclude, this is how an expense management software truly streamlines, automates, and takes the frustration out of construction expense management. 

Building new standards for employee expense management in the construction industry

Most expense management software, even the ones built a decade ago, offer most of these features. However, it is important that the expense software makes the process effortless. A clean and easy to use interface, a brilliant end-user experience, and the ability to innovate and scale are things you should look for in 2020.

Fyle is all of those things, and more. It is everything the construction industry needs to make employee expense management a breeze!

While you build homes and marvels, we’ll take care of building and managing your construction expense management processes. Schedule a demo with us today!