Employee expense reports can often be the bane of a business’s existence.
With manual, paper-based expense report processes, staff have to dig through receipts, manually input each expenditure, and then put it all together. And then there’s the additional time the finance department has to spend reviewing and reconciling.
If one thing goes wrong in the process – a lost receipt, discrepancy, or violation of a corporate expense policy, for instance — it can take even more hours to resolve the issue.
Most businesses can’t afford to waste this amount of time and staff resources on tedious tasks. And even if you can afford it, surely those resources could be put to better use elsewhere.
There’s a better way: employee expense report automation.
With technological advancements, manual expense reporting is becoming a thing of the past. Especially if you have remote staff, or employees who travel a lot, expense automation speeds up the process and makes it less stressful for all involved.
With expense automation, you can:
- Submit receipts from anywhere at any time. Some software, like Concur Expense, will even let employees submit receipts by taking a picture with their smartphone.
- Automatically review and reconcile in an identified system.
- Catch and enforce corporate policy, like travel budget caps or exaggerated expense items.
This alone will save a ton of time and costs, but the benefits don’t end there. Once a system is in place, there can be a trickledown effect of even more savings. For one thing, you’ll need less paper, which will reduce office expenses. But more than that, you’ll be able to put more focus on analysis.
With better employee expense analysis, you might be able to take advantage of corporate discounts, such as bulk airline ticket purchasing, or negotiate a deal at a frequently used hotel. You can also see exactly where your employee expenses are being spent and look for opportunities to save on costs. While you may be doing some of this already, if the administrative tasks become more automated, this will free up much more time for review.
You’ll also be able to automatically integrate employee expenses into your current ERP or accounting system, which will help with your overall budgeting and forecasting. And with that data easily accessible in real time, you can put to use the power of process like predictive analytics.
When it comes to employee expense automation, there’s hardly any downside. It is one process that can significantly improve your operations and create countless efficiencies, which saves you money.
At SHEA Global, we’ve helped businesses incorporate employee expense automation into their operations with great success. Concur is one of the leading solutions for expense automation and we have developed our Concur Connector which provides an out of the box integration for our clients between Concur and ERP systems such as Microsoft Dynamics GP.
SHEA Global can help you get the most out of your expense automation systems, like Concur.
Learn more about Concur at https://www.concur.ca.
Contact us to find out how SHEA Global can help with your business automation needs. We can be reached at (905) 470 6830 or SHEAGlobal.com.