Modern expense management isn’t just about recording expenses and automating expense approval workflows anymore. The needs for expense management are broadening at every organization, depending on their growth stage. From advances, trips, financial control, or even automated policy enforcement, every organization now demands a more wholesome approach to managing expenses. With such dynamics, it’s crucial that businesses are backed by a software that caters to these expense management needs in a centralized manner.
At Sage Expense Management (formerly Fyle), we understand these needs and the role they play in the growth of your business. Hence, expense management with Fyle isn’t merely about automation. It is about covering futuristic prerequisites of all growing businesses, like corporate cards, trips, audit trail, analytics and more.
Since the most obvious extension of any expense management software is managing travel, this article will dive into Trip Reports. This is one of the features within our Trips module that makes it exceptionally attractive and unique for businesses to choose Sage Expense Management. Additionally, it serves as an easy and effective way to manage and track expenses.
Travel expense reports - The solution to every Finance team's nightmare
For organizations to analyze and improve financial control, businesses need to understand where every penny is spent. Trip expenses are the most challenging to track, get a bird’s eye view and improve.
An estimated 12.8% of expense fraud takes place during trips. This costs businesses an average loss of 30,000 USD every fiscal year globally. This pressing reason makes it non-negotiable for organizations to overlook how employees spend during trips.
To help combat these challenges, we created Trip Reports. it serves two primary purposes:
- Help employees stay on top of their expenses
- Provide finance teams complete visibility on total trip-wise spends
Here's how expense reports work within Sage Expense Management
Employees raise a trip request for stay and travel bookings. Once approved, the travel desk completes the necessary bookings. The travel desk then creates non-reimbursable booking expenses on the employee’s behalf and adds it to the trip. “Trip Reports” ensure finance teams are well aware of expenses, even the ones that employees don’t necessarily make on their own.
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Once approved, employees can begin their business trip by creating a draft report. Here they can continue adding expenses and associate them to the trip in real-time. Sage Expense Management makes sure all duplicate expenses are flagged, and no expense claims have any policy violations. Once the trip ends, employees can still submit expenses and associate them to the trip. Employees can also submit expenses and associate them to respective trips, even after the trip ends.
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Once all expenses are filled, employees can submit their expense reports and mark the trip as ‘closed'. Now, finance teams can easily get a complete overview of trip-wise spending. They can also gain additional insight into details such as spend by category, flagged duplicate expenses, policy violations, reimbursable/billable/non-reimbursable expenses, and more.
SUGGESTED READS:
Modern travel and expense management with Sage Expense Management
The future of travel expense management in an automated world
Everything you need to know about managing employee travel expenses
What's next for trip reports?
At Sage Expense Management, we understand how expense management is interlinked with travel. We also know how travel is linked with cash advances and draft reports. We’re soon rolling out innovations that will make trip reports a stronger component of your travel and expense management. Stay tuned!
Are you already using trip reports? We’d love to know about your experience!
Want to give trip reports a try? Begin with a free trial today or schedule a demo to know more!
