Tracking the business costs, especially managing expenses is a big pain point. Starting from collecting data to create expense reports, then managers approving those expenses for reimbursement, to tracking other employee benefit expenses, is necessary for claiming tax deductions.

Though big companies have resorted to expense software in UK, smaller companies still hold on to manual inefficient reporting practices like paper reports, physical receipts, etc. With such practices companies face various frustration points like:

• Due to lack of information employees making purchases that aren’t allowed
• Reimbursement delays caused due to unclear purchases
• Duplicate or fraudulent receipts getting acceptance
• Tax penalties due to inadvertent mistakes in cash flows

Therefore, automatic expense software is a smart solution to help companies manage their travel and expense operations and increase productivity at each level of the organization. Employees just need to upload the receipts and documents directly to the software through any device – mobile phone, laptop, or tablet. Then the software processes those and initiates reimbursement without any payment delays.

Let’s deeply understand the top benefits of expense management software.

1. Seamless And Speedy Process

Here the traditional process of approval and reimbursement is automated with a more efficient system in place. Once the employee submits the documents or receipts as per the criteria on the dashboard, it goes to the approval manager and once the approval manager accepts it, the payment is directly sent to the payroll and the employee gets a notification for the approval too.

This helps companies save processing time and reduce a lot of processing costs like paper printing, searching for manual records, hard copies of policies, etc. Managers don’t even track how much is spent on processing charges which is not the issue with expense software.

2. Improved Operational Efficiency

You can improve your operational efficiency to maximize the cash flow. With timely and accurate employee reports, cash flow improves with direct expense billing to clients. With expense management software, you usually get other business solutions like project management, time tracking, accounting, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software which simplifies the whole process.

This helps the human resources to focus on key tasks like budget planning and doing sales pitches, rather than typing data into the system.

3. Expense Policy Implementation

Updating knowledge for an employee, especially for managers handling a hectic workload, is more time-consuming and redundant than automated software. Here the expense software updates itself with the new expense policy or tax changes and automatically flags out-of-policy expenditures by the employees.

For example, per day meal allowances for an employee may have increased but employees may be submitting expense reports based on old amounts. Such scenarios are avoided by an automated system that resolves the situation by adjusting the additional allowance for the later expense by the employee.

4. Improved Visibility

You can save costs on a salaried employee who maintains reports of employee expenses and reimbursements, analysis and submits those to managers at different levels of your organization.

With expense software, you have the benefit of automated reports generation on the dashboard, which gives a detailed analysis with metrics like per employee average expense, most expenses incurred by department, the average time to approve expenses, etc. This way there is more transparency and less headache of human error and repetitive workload.

5. Enhanced Fraud Avoidance

With piling up receipts, it becomes easy to loop-in fraudulent or repetitive receipts for more reimbursement. A global study report found that 26% of such fraudulent receipts were perpetuated by executives and upper management, which makes it more difficult to take strict measures.

But the expense management system detects such frauds and errors easily before going to the approval manager or payroll process.

Conclusion

Upgrading the business with expense management software is a wise choice. It helps businesses to tackle various challenges like human errors, huge time taken, and payment delays. The system benefits the companies by making the verification and reimbursement process seamless and faster, improving the reporting and operational efficiency process, and preventing frauds in the system.