In a modern business setup, it is a common approach during business trips for employees to manage a range of business transactions out of their pockets. Employees take care of T&E costs like boarding expenses and meal charges. Once these out-of-pocket costs are reported, organizations will refund the employee expenses.
Though it sounds simple in theory, business expense management is a genuine conundrum. On one hand, employees want to get the refunds quickly and without delays, while companies like to take their time to validate the expense claims. It ends up delaying reimbursement processing, which frustrates employees. Companies can avoid a whole lot of trouble by using expense management software.
Expense management software explained
Expense management software is a digital platform that allows companies to automate expense filing, validate claims, enforce expense policies, get stakeholder approvals, and process payments. It is aimed at expediting the end-to-end business expense management processes.
Traditionally, businesses – especially small and medium-sized companies – rely on manual processes such as paper forms, spreadsheets, etc. Such an approach delays refund processing by weeks, if not months, with finance teams spending days verifying the legitimacy of the transaction. While it may still be accommodated in organizations with low headcounts, manual methods will create operational chaos as the resource count grows. To avoid employee frustration and disappointment, you must use expense management software and gain the below advantages.
Eliminate errors in reporting claims
Manual business expense management involves filling out several forms by hand like giving details of every expense. It will increase the possibility of making a mistake or error when filing the expense report. This will have employees submit the reports again. At times, even a single mistake will become grounds for claim rejection.
Using expense management software like Zaggle EMS, you can automate expense report creation. It allows you to drag and drop a digital version of your bills. The platform leverages AI-based OCR to read information from the bills and automate submissions in just a few clicks.
Avoid fraudulent expense claims
Manual processes of business expense management will provide loopholes for fraudulent claims. The unstructured method of managing expense claims will have employees resorting to a variety of creative ideas like inflated bills, duplicate invoices, or fabricated claims. With the workload that the finance team has to manage, it shouldn’t be a surprise if one or two false claims make it through the approval stage.
Avoiding fraudulent claims is a priority for businesses, and EMS is just the tool to help them. It allows your employees to submit digital receipts, and the transactions are automatically categorized under different expense buckets. The digital-first process of making claims submission eliminates the possibility of filing fraudulent reports.
Enforce expense policy compliance
Every organization compiles a set of rules and guidelines to help employees avoid making irrelevant purchases. Regardless of how strong the expense policy is, employees will continue to make invalid expenses. It is due to a lack of communication and guardrails against violations. Zaggle EMS, however, sets you up for efficient policy compliance by integrating your policy into the business expense management processes.
It allows you to configure alerts and reminders that get triggered whenever an employee is about to violate the expense policy like exceeding the purchase threshold, making transactions for banned expense categories, and so on.
Get real-time visibility
When expenses are made across departments, it becomes difficult to investigate the efficiency of the expense management strategy. With expenditures distributed across divisions and locations, decision-makers don’t get a full picture of the current stance.
Using expense management software like Zaggle EMS, you get access to real-time insights. It will allow you to track, monitor, and manage expense reports from one centralized dashboard.
Automate stakeholder approval
One major bottleneck to speed up reimbursement processing is approvals. With different expense claims requiring approval from different stakeholders, the finance teams end up running around the cabins of senior management. You can avoid this and reduce business expense management time significantly using Zaggle EMS. It allows you to create multiple automated workflows connecting relevant stakeholders for faster approvals.
Simplify business expense management with EMS
Business expense management is one of the core tenets of robust cash flow and financial discipline for any organization. No matter how streamlined your expense workflow is and how strong the expense policy is, companies are always at risk without an expense management platform. It is critical to create an efficient expense management process eliminating manual processes that eat away at time and quality. It is also equally important to pick the right tool like Zaggle EMS.
