Modern workforce consists of onsite, offsite, and remote employees. At the same time, many companies require employees to engage in domestic and international business travel regularly.
Hence, employees incur a variety of out-of-pocket expenses regularly for business purposes. They experience stress and feel unmotivated when employers do not speed up expense reimbursements. Also, delays in expense reimbursements increase employee financial burden.
You can keep employees satisfied and motivated by automating the expense reimbursement process in several ways. For instance, your company can automate the process by implementing the best expense reimbursement software. Otherwise, it can automate interlinked processes by implementing integrated travel and expense software.
In addition to streamlining expense reimbursements, the tailored software will help your company control costs by tracking, reviewing, and auditing various employee-initiated expenses. Here are some reasons why your company must implement the best expense reimbursement software.
10 Reasons Why Your Company Must Implement the Best Expense Reimbursement Software
1. Communicate and Enforce Expense Policy
While configuring the expense reimbursement solution, you can implement custom and granular expense policies. Employees can use the software to access organizational expense policies seamlessly. Hence, they can avoid incurring out-of-policy violations.
At the same time, business travelers can access the integrated travel and expense management solution to book in-policy travel products and avoid out-of-policy travel expenses. Hence, it becomes easier for your company to control ongoing costs by defining and enforcing expense policies.
2. Automate Expense Approval Process
Your company can control costs by requiring employees to incur specific out-of-policy expenses only after getting the required approvals. Employees can use the software to understand the approval workflow and process clearly.
Also, they can use the same software to send expense approval requests to the appropriate authority directly. The approver can use the software to review and approve/reject the expense request submitted by an employee quickly.
3. Digitalize Expense Reports
Your company cannot streamline the expense reimbursement process when employees submit paper-based expense reports. The best expense reimbursement software enables your employees to generate and submit digital expense reports.
Furthermore, it saves time by generating expense reports automatically based on information collected from invoices and receipts scanned by employees. Your employees can use mobile devices to generate and submit automated expense reports early and accurately.
4. Get Real-Time Spend Visibility
The best expense reimbursement tool will store employee-initiated expense data in a centralized location. Also, it will align each employee-initiated expense to relevant categories like office expenses, travel expenses, and auto mileage.
You can use the dashboard provided by the software to track employee-initiated expenses in real-time based on status like pending, processes, paid, and unpaid. The real-time spend visibility helps you make informed financial decisions while detecting policy violations and expense fraud.
5. Facilitate Regular Expense Audits
As mentioned earlier, approvers can use the expense reimbursement solution to review and process expense claims submitted by employees. The software will capture their comments and remarks while approving or rejecting expense claims.
At the same time, the software enables seamless access to invoices, receipts, and bills related to employee-initiated expenses. The digital audit trail and seamless invoice access will help you conduct expense audits regularly. The audit results will help you enhance policy compliance, curtail unnecessary expenses, and prevent expense fraud.
6. Generate Custom Reports
You can use the dashboard provided by the best expense reimbursement software to generate and schedule various custom reports. For instance, you can use the dashboard to generate expense reports using department, purpose, and project.
Likewise, you can generate custom reports using travel destination, travel goal, project, and other criteria while using an integrated travel and expense management solution. The reports generated based on real-time data help you understand and analyze expenses incurred by remote employees and business travelers.
7. Share and Update Expense Data
You can use the cloud-based expense reimbursement solution with various enterprise systems using application programming interfaces (APIs). You can use specific APIs to integrate the software with accounting, ERP, HRMS, travel management, and other business systems.
The integration facilitates automated and seamless expense data flow across interconnected systems. Also, it makes up-to-date expense data accessible to managers and decision-makers across departments. Hence, it becomes easier for managers to make budgets and forecast costs based on real-time expense data.
8. Get Data-Driven Insight
In addition to unifying expense data, the best expense reimbursement software uses predictive and prescriptive analytics. The predictive analytics solutions make the software effective in predicting future costs and project cash flow based on filed and unfiled expense claims of employees.
At the same time, the software uses prescriptive analytics solutions to detect trends and patterns by analyzing historical expense data. The software gains and shares various data-driven insights that you can use to speed up expense reimbursements, improve policy compliance, and find cost-saving opportunities.
9. Prevent Expense Report Fraud
Employees these days inflate reimbursements by executing various expense report fraud. Some employees defraud employers by inflating or manipulating expenses, while others claim false expenses by submitting false invoices.
Your company can not streamline the expense reimbursement process without detecting and preventing various types of expense fraud. The best expense reimbursement detects expense fraud using intelligence technologies. It sends automated notifications when an employee submits duplicate invoices or violates predefined expense policies.
10. Boost Employee Experience
As noted earlier, reimbursement delays make employees experience stress. The stress makes them feel unmotivated and impacts their productivity. The best expense reimbursement software helps your company boost employee experience by speeding up reimbursements and payments.
Employees can use the software to submit automated expense reports early. Likewise, the finance team does not require additional time to review and process digital expense reports. Also, the data accuracy reduces the reimbursement time significantly.
Conclusion
The best expense reimbursement software helps your company keep employees satisfied and motivated by accelerating expense reimbursements. Your finance team can use the software to reduce the time required to review and process additional expense claims.
At the same time, you can leverage the software to control costs by ensuring policy compliance, preventing expense report fraud, and tracking employee-initiated expenses. Your company also has the option to automate multiple processes simultaneously by implementing integrated travel and expense management software.