Expense policies play an essential role in making sure finance teams stay compliant. In such cases, one might assume that automation to enforce policies would be a norm but unfortunately, it isn't. There’s a common misconception that automation hampers financial control and forces multiple process changes. This makes businesses hesitant to switch to a modern expense management software. At Sage Expense Management, we ensure that implementing technology doesn’t mean that.
The platform takes care of your expense management needs end-to-end . This allows organizations to have complete control over their policy and compliance. You don’t have to worry about changing existing processes as we replicate every expense approval workflow, no matter how complex.
We’re constantly innovating to help finance teams automate policy enforcement in workflows that otherwise remained inaccessible. We understand that today policy enforcement only revolves around expenses. However, the scope of expense management is continually evolving. Trips, advances, corporate cards, travel and expense data analytics, receipt management and more, are now a part of our day-to-day expense management.
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Travel Policy for Employees in Trip Requests
Our platforms' ‘Trips,’ helps manage end-to-end business travel of employees. This includes trip requests, travel booking requests, custom approval workflows, automated policy checks and more.
The policy checks so far within ‘Trips’ were limited to employees reporting duplicate expenses, submitting receipts against expenses over weekends or holidays, etc. From what we understand interacting with our customers, is that there is still room for policy violations to seep in. We then took a holistic approach towards solving this and introduced policy checks around employee actions.
Finance teams can now achieve the following when creating policies in trip requests:
- Create policies around specific bookings (like hotel or transport) on trip requests
- Limit policies to a specific timeline
- Help employees understand why certain expenses are flagged for violation
- Regulate all employee actions without restricting any admin control
- Allow trip requests to be flagged, saved and submitted
- Understand exact line items that are flagged and need manual intervention
Policies in Advance Requests
The ‘Advances’ features have helped regulate and account for cash advances that were otherwise lost in communication over multiple channels.
Our platform solved this challenge by centralizing the entire cash advance management process. Organizations can streamline cash advance requests, custom approvals and non-reimbursable expense reporting for advances.
Our next obvious step was to help businesses enable policies on advance requests. We built this feature specifically to eliminate manual interventions and curb expense frauds that are usually coupled with cash advances.
Finance teams can now achieve the following when creating policies in advance requests:
- Implement specific policies on advance requests raised by employees, and not on advances issued directly by admins
- Restrict the number of advance requests raised by a specific set of employees
- Restrict advance request amount raised by a specific set of employees
- Get a detailed overview of violated policies through ‘Comments’ within advance requests
- Re-run policies on advance requests, when tweaked
- Apply policy evaluations only on unapproved advance requests, and not on already approved requests
- Get notifications about marking certain custom fields within request forms as mandatory. This can be done to avoid unnecessary policy violations
What’s next for Travel and Expense Policies?
We believe that policies play a crucial role in organizations staying compliant. Although, policy enforcement comes at a cost today - a frustrating employee experience.
While we’ve already solved this problem by helping organizations provide a differentiated employee experience, the future calls for a lot more. We plan to automate the enforcement of every policy without compromising on the experience for employees and enhanced control for finance teams. Our future efforts towards policies aimed at addressing both these crucial aspects of managing and streamlining expense management.
Check out what our customers have to say here:
Sage Expense Management reviews on G2 Crowd
Sage Expense Management reviews on Capterra
We’ve already helped many organizations stay compliant with our automated policy enforcement. If you want to know how, feel free to schedule a demo with us today!
