By Kevin Peterson
With the increase in business travel costs, companies should find more effective methods to minimize the challenges that come with travel expense management. Corporate travel involves various challenges – claim submissions, approvals, reimbursements and more that require much collaboration and verification. The bigger the business is, the more complicated internal processes are.
With modern HR technology, businesses and employees can get a wide-range of benefits with travel and expense report tools. Some of them include:
- Digital receipt capture
- Approval of claims from any device, anytime
- Tracking expenses more easily, whenever required
- Reduced processing time
- Quick reimbursements
- Quick expense approvals
Here are some reasons why your business should invest in a travel and expense management solution.
Procedures Simplified
Filling expense reports manually can be time-consuming and daunting. Besides, making the process faster, expense report software can help simplify the entire process and streamline internal procedures. Report creation can be done with just a few keystrokes and clicks. Also, receipts can be easily added to an expense report as they get auto-scanned by our Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. You no longer need to worry about missed or lost receipts.
Data Capture
Expense software will help record, evaluate, and compare business travel expenses, so human resource teams better understand expense reporting silos while working towards a better travel budget. Data recorded by expense report tool will allow you to track various kinds of reports, stats, and advanced options. Analytics will give you a detailed view about spending by expense category, department, and business unit. You can easily find out who is spending more and why you are going out-of-budget. Also, you can get the insights and analysis required to make informed decisions.
Fraud Detection
An expense report solution makes it easy to identify and track false expense reports or elevated claims by flagging suspicious claims and duplicate expenses. The system allows you to define business rules, so when an employee submits out-of-policy claims, the solution triggers automatic notifications to the approvers. Alternatively, you can configure the system not to accept out-of-policy claims and when done, an email would be sent back to the submitter. This would avoid getting out-of-policy submissions and help prevent fraud while introducing cost-cutting initiatives.
Improved Productivity
Since automated expense systems make it easier for business travelers to submit claims and easier for the finance department to process claims, both will see an improved level of efficiency and convenience with minimal errors. Businesses want employees to focus on core company goals and more time spent on internal processes can affect productivity.
Integration
Some expense reporting systems allow travelers to book trips directly from the booking systems of travel providers. Businesses can also work towards minimizing the need for the employee to make a claim, provided the travel data is captured automatically. Integration with booking systems offer several benefits such as direct data capture, define business rules into the booking system, and accurate travel data. Also, integration with accounting systems will make the reimbursement process easy.
Mobile Optimization
Most expense report systems will offer mobile optimization features where employees can directly capture receipt and upload into the system. When done on mobile, everything is easy and made faster compared to desktops. Users do not need to wait long periods of time to get their work complete, everything can be done at their convenience. Frequent flyers who have already performed tasks on portable devices would find it easier and convenient.
Modernization
In today’s digital age, you have to modernize business expense processes through cloud-based expense report solutions to be a part of the growing digital world. With ever-increasing tools and software solutions in place, businesses can leverage intangible benefits that technology adds to every internal process. Organizations with frequent travelers should use the best expense reporting system to automate, monitor, and manage travel and expense claims in an effective way.
With technology, you can get your work done quickly without much human intervention. Also, it becomes easy for you to track and record every expense claim your employee submits. This way you would not only monitor expenses end-to-end, but can also analyze the company spending by setting clear budgets for every expense category.
Photo credit: Business woman traveling with luggage from Nicoleta Ionescu/Shutterstock
