Automating your travel and expense process is one of the best things you can do for your business.
Why? Because it will both maximise your returns and minimise your spend with no or low added value, saving you both time and money.
Manually creating, reviewing, reconciling and reimbursing expense claims is a time consuming process. Extracting relevant data to analyse is a struggle, to say the least. And weighing expense reports up against business targets is nigh on impossible without the right insights.
With the right expense tool, you'll be able to enjoy a carefree process that will leave your employees feeling both invested and empowered, rather than struggling to understand company policies. Below are three reasons you'll want to consider making the switch from manual to automated.
1. Max return vs. minimum spend
With an expense tool, you can automate and enforce expense report compliance at entry level to flag or even prevent non-compliant claims. You can also set a tolerance level that both respects your financial policy and empowers your high potential employees, thus reducing aggravation.
Expense automation acts on seven levers:
- It saves time by streamlining the process and making it easier to view in whole or in part, at item or business unit level.
- Tracking receipts becomes a breeze with smartphone capture and online archiving.
- It increases satisfaction for both end users and controllers by simplifying and speeding up the process.
- It strongly reduces the incidence of error and fraud.
- The included dashboards allow you to easily keep an eye on your numbers, from usage to reimbursements, enabling better budgeting and cost control.
- Policies are automatically enforced at every step of the way, avoiding the cost of non-compliant or fraudulent claims.
- An automated process supports your company’s scaling, allowing you to grow faster without worrying about expense management
2. More efficient & profitable travel planning
With business travel having resumed, now is a good time to ensure that you are set up in a way to make travel as profitable and efficient as it can be in your organisation.
With an expense tool tailored to your needs, you can establish travel pre-approval to ensure that employees are taking advantage of that special Eurostar offer or flight deal as it comes up. No more losing a deal because a manager is too busy to sign off on it!
Integrated spend reports offer actionable insights, such as guiding your choice of travel partner based on what percentage of your travel budget goes to flights, overnight stays or entertainment. More accurate budgeting means a better allocation of funds to where they will have the biggest impact.
It's also worth noting that offering your team members a comprehensive view on their expenses tends to lead to a deeper level of awareness. And with that increased awareness, they become more invested in making the most out of that expensive flight.
Supported by clear policies, a strong expense tool streamlines your processes and helps you make data-driven decisions at every level in the organisation.
3. Time savings = cost savings
An automated expense tool lets your users log their expenses from their smartphone, uploading receipts to an app on the go. This mobility frees up precious time they can then spend on higher added value tasks and means they spend less energy fighting process inefficiencies. And happy employees = productive employees.
Managers can also approve requests from their phone, comfortable in the knowledge that legal and policy compliance are assured, leaving them only to validate the business need for an expense. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools flag non-compliant items for further review, letting the approver and controller focus on what matters.
And finally, controllers are left with a steadier and more compliant flow of expenses with fewer bottlenecks, resulting in faster reimbursements. Between policy automation and OCR, the time spent controlling expenses is drastically decreased by up to 90%, making for much improved productivity.
Investing in automated expense management is a sure-fire way to maximise your return while minimising spend, increase the efficiency and profitability of travel planning and save you both time and money.
