Manual expense management isn’t about sticking to a cost-effective, traditional approach anymore. Companies are losing significant operational costs to errors and delays in manual expense activities. According to the Global Business Travel Association report, businesses lose around Rs 4000 ($52) for every mistake in expense reimbursement claims. Although this number may vary depending on company size, there is no arguing that manual methods add to the overall cost. In addition to the cost, slow expense reimbursements could lead to employee frustration. Since they pay for company expenses out of their pockets it affects their personal cash flow.
All of these challenges make automation for expense management a necessity. In this blog post, we will discuss the significance of automating expense reimbursement workflow for both SMEs and enterprises alike.
Employee Expense Reimbursement Automation – How Does It Work?
Typically, employees use their own money to pay for corporate expenses like flight tickets, accommodation, and meals when they are on business trips. They collect all the bills and receipts to submit them to the finance team when claiming reimbursements. The finance team validates the expenses and forwards the claim to stakeholders for approval to disburse refunds. The entire process takes months if not weeks.
This process is marred by below issues:
- Data entry errors
- Receipt mismanagement
- Duplicate or inflated bills
With an automation solution, you can streamline the end-to-end expense reimbursement process right from claim submission to payment disbursal. These tools leverage emerging technologies like AI/ML to capture bill amounts, validate expenses, and automate approval workflow for expedited refunds. All this with minimal human intervention.
Let’s quickly breakdown how automation tools in expense management works.
Digitalize Bill Receipts: With automation solutions, your employees can submit expense reports digitally through a mobile app. It will not only replace paper receipts, which are prone to damage but also initiate the expense reimbursement process as soon as the transaction happens.
Automated Data Capture & Validation: Once the digital bill is received, the solution will capture data using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and verify it against historical data and approved budget. By eliminating manual data entry, it reduces errors and time spent on claims management.
Automated Approval Workflows: The expense management system allows teams to configure multiple workflows based on predefined rules. It means every expense reimbursement claim is routed to the concerned stakeholder automatically. It will also trigger timely reminders to avoid delays.
Policy Enforcement: With an automated solution, you can integrate your expense policy to block budget overruns, and restricted category purchases. It means you can move ahead with the validation process confidently and quickly.
Faster Expense Reimbursements: Once the claim is approved through configured workflows, the refund is disbursed automatically to the employee account, eliminating the wait by the employees to receive the money.
Automate Expense Reimbursement with Zaggle EMS
To ensure seamless employee expense reimbursements, companies need a robust solution like Zaggle EMS. It is an all-in-one expense management system that facilitates advanced capabilities and automation so that companies can digitally transform their expense management processes. With Zaggle EMS, you can:
Improve employee experience: It eliminates roadblocks in claim submissions to ensure swift reimbursements by automating claim verification and approval. Automation helps in improving employee experience thereby enhancing their satisfaction and motivation.
Enhanced productivity: Your finance team can focus on critical tasks instead of manual data entry, and approval follow-ups. Automating these time-consuming processes saves your resources.
Better compliance: By integrating expense reimbursement policies within the expense management solution, you can ensure compliance with industry standards and government regulations.
Real-time Visibility: Zaggle EMS gives you real-time visibility into your expense management strategy. With AI-based insights and analytics, you can keep your expenses under control.
Learn more about Zaggle EMS here.
