Why is expense report automation important?

Why is Expense Report Automation Important?

Why is expense report automation important?

By Said Ul Amin | Submitted on November 18, 2022.

Gone are the days when we had to perform a lot of mundane tasks and were inefficient in managing the process.

Today, technology is making the process easier and more convenient, allowing employees to spend more time on important tasks. Of course, every business process will benefit from automation.

However, automation can help make business processes more efficient. Automation can greatly benefit business processes that involve administrative tasks.

One such business process that involves many administrative activities is expense reporting. From travel booking to report processing, there are many steps where automation can come into play and save time for everyone involved.

This will not only make the process efficient but also add value to the organization and improve the bottom line.

Let's take a look at a few reasons why automation can help and why it's needed to streamline processes.

Save the big one.

Time is of the essence of everything we do in business. Automation will not only save a lot of man-hours, but it will also reduce the time taken to process compensation claims.

Now we see why expense reporting takes so long. First, the employee has to spend more time filling out the expense report, saving all the receipts, and sending the reports to the approver.

Approvers have to verify and validate all the reports that have come in and then approve after successful validation.

Verification should not be done in haste, all details need to be error-free and verified to detect illegitimate expenditure and misreporting.

To do this in less time, organizations need to compromise the authentication process, which can result in fraudulent spending.

What if you could complete the verification in less time? Expense management software will automate the verification process by flagging suspect expense claims and sending them back to the submitter for correction.

This will not only save time in processing expense reports but also reduce various steps in the expense management process.

T&E Policy.

Organizations have detailed travel and expense policies in place but do not always ensure that these policies are enforced in real-time.

Implementing a T&E policy is difficult and sometimes requires organizations to allocate some resources to ensure that everything is within the policy.

This is where automation comes in. An automated expense report system will help you automate the implementation of the T&E policy and ensure that employees do not submit expense claims outside of the policy.

The software limits the entries in the expense report. For example, your T&E policy may say that only certain types of hotel chain bookings are allowed, but when your employee books a hotel that is not on the list.

When you do this in a spreadsheet, it will be difficult to track and ensure that employees are not accruing expenses to approved vendors.

Unlike traditional processes, an automated expense solution will prevent employees from collecting any data that is not contained in the T&E policy.

This will ensure that out-of-policy reporting does not occur. This is just one example and the same can be done with any other aspect of expense management.

The software will not allow any exceptions and will call the system supervisor's attention if it exists. Therefore, everything will be done correctly and in a timely manner.

Reports and Analytics.

Real-time reports are a major reason for automation. By automating the process, you can have the opportunity to fully analyze the entire process and gain insights that can help guide the decision-making process.

Taking a data-driven approach to decision-making will give you visibility and transparency into the system, which is a desirable way to control fraud and misreporting in your organization.

Analytics can help organizations plan and forecast better. Budgets can be more practical now that you can understand where the process is flawed.

Say the finance department wants to know whether reports have been processed or any other information, analytics will provide you with all the details in just a few clicks.

Expense report automation can help a business in a number of ways. The software solution will transform the way expenses are reported and paid by eliminating undesirable aspects such as misreporting, fraud, and reimbursement delays.

Another great benefit that the software offers are reminders and alerts.

There can be a lot of miscommunication when employees take a manual approach, but the software solution triggers constant notifications and alerts to all stakeholders to ensure there are no communication gaps and that the process runs smoothly.