Most organizations these days adopt distributed work models. They hire remote workers and allow employees to work from home. At the same time, they make employees engage in domestic and international business travel regularly.
Employers allow remote employees and work travelers to make purchases and incur expenses for business purposes. Employees experience stress and feel unmotivated when the employer does not reimburse expenses early and effortlessly.
Businesses motivate employees and reduce employee financial burden by streamlining the expense reimbursement process through automation. They implement expense reimbursement software that helps employees submit digital expense reports without putting in extra time and effort.
Furthermore, the software helps the finance team reduce the time and effort required to process more expense claims. It further helps the finance team track, process, analyze, and audit employee-initiated expenses like expense tracking software.
Here are some key features and tools provided by the expense reimbursement software that help your organization streamline a complex financial process.
10 Ways Expense Reimbursement Software Streamlines a Crucial Business Process
Ensure Policy Compliance
Expense reimbursement software supports granular expense policy configurations. You can leverage the feature to configure policies for specific groups of employees like remote workers, work travelers, and employees working from home.
Each employee can use the software to access relevant expense rules seamlessly. Hence, he can identify and avoid incurring non-reimbursable expenses. At the same time, the software will help employees claim only reimbursable expenses by reviewing their expense reports.
Streamline Expense Request Approvals
Your policy should allow employees to incur specific expenses after getting approval from the relevant authority. But you must help employees know which authority can approve what type of expense. Also, you need to ensure that they can send expense report approval requests directly to the appropriate authority.
While configuring the expense management system, you can define custom approval workflows. Employees can use the software to send expense approval requests to the right authority. Also, the approver can use the same software to approve or reject the request quickly.
Automate Expense Reports
An expense reimbursement solution enables employees to submit digital expense reports. The expense report digitalization helps your company overcome some of the major shortcomings of paper-based expense reporting – data entry errors, receipt duplications, and expense fraud.
Employees can leverage the software’s auto-scanning feature to generate automated expense reports in minutes. The chances of error are eliminated as the report uses information directly captured from scanned invoices and receipts.
Reduce Expense Reimbursement Time
Your finance team needs more time to review and process paper-based expense reports. However, they can process digital expense reports without putting in extra time and effort. Hence, it becomes easier for them to speed up expense reimbursements despite a surge in expense claims. Further, the software facilitates direct money transfers to employees’ bank accounts by supporting ACH payments.
Get Real-Time Spend Visibility
Like expense tracking software, expense reimbursement tools feature intuitive dashboards. You can use the dashboard to track employee-initiated expenses in real time. Your finance team will use the dashboard to track unprocessed expense claims and speed up reimbursements.
At the same time, you can use the dashboard to make informed financial decisions by getting real-time spending visibility. Furthermore, the spend visibility will help you predict cash flows and make budgets based on real-time expense data.
Generate Custom Reports
In addition to facilitating real-time expense tracking, the dashboard enables you to generate and schedule custom reports in minutes. You can use the dashboard to generate reports based on real-time expense data using parameters like employee type, department, and purpose.
Also, you can measure and evaluate employee-initiated expenses using custom reports using metrics like expense changes, expense composition, and untagged expenses. The custom reporting features help you compare expenses with revenue, profits, and similar financial outcomes.
Simplify Expense Audits
As noted earlier, approvers can use the expense reimbursement software to approve or reject expense claims submitted by employees. While reviewing expense reports, they make various comments. The software creates an automated audit trail by capturing the remarks or comments made by approvers.
Also, it enables auditors to access receipts and invoices corresponding to employee-initiated expenses digitally and seamlessly. The audit trials and invoice access help you prevent policy violations, refine expense lists, and control costs by conducting expense audits regularly.
Prevent Expense Fraud
Employees these days cause revenue leaks by executing various forms of expense fraud. The expense reimbursement software makes it difficult for employees to commit expense fraud by generating automated expense reports.
Additionally, it detects expense fraud using intelligence technology. It further sends you automated notifications after detecting any expense fraud. Hence, it becomes easier for your company to prevent expense fraud by taking appropriate actions.
Get Data-Driven Insights
Modern expense management systems help you make sense of expense data. Leading systems come with built-in data analytics solutions. They use advanced data analytics solutions to make employee expense data analysis an automated and ongoing process.
The feature enables expense reimbursement software to gain and share data-driven insights with you. You can leverage the actionable insights to find ways to control employee-initiated expenses by making data-driven decisions.
Boost Employee Experience
Your company cannot increase operational efficiency and accelerate growth without keeping employees satisfied and motivated. As mentioned earlier, employees experience stress when the finance team needs more time to reimburse expenses.
The stress impacts their productivity and makes them feel unmotivated. You can implement expense reimbursement software to keep employees motivated and boost their productivity by accelerating the expense reimbursement process.
Conclusion
Expense reimbursement software helps your organization save the time and resources required to track, process, audit, and analyze employee-initiated expenses. Your employee can use the software to submit digital expense reports early and effortlessly.
At the same time, your finance team can use the software to speed up expense reimbursements. Also, they can use it as expense tracking software to make informed financial decisions by getting real-time spend visibility. You can gain actionable insights by implementing expense reimbursement software featuring data analytics.