How Automation Transforms Employee Expense Reporting

Running an organization often feels like walking a tightrope—balancing diligence and thoroughness without sacrificing time and efficiency. Take employee expense reporting processes, for example. Few things can be more disastrous when done incorrectly than expense reporting workflows. 

If a company’s expense report process is too vague or simple, it risks exposure to expense fraud. Additionally, a lack of detailed employee expense reporting could result in missing key information for IRS-compliant mileage logs, potentially costing your organization money. On the flip side, making expense reporting too complex can discourage employees from submitting reports altogether, leading to slow reimbursements and low compliance. So how can you walk that tightrope?

Pssst… Have you considered automation?

As more and more of the world goes online, and more and more organizations interact with mobile employees through computers and smart devices instead of in person, the benefits of integrating technology in the workplace become clearer and clearer. Why not take advantage of a highly digitized, increasingly mobile workforce by automating the expense reporting process? 

While technology can’t replace human intelligence, it can automate tedious processes so mobile employees can focus their efforts on their actual jobs instead of worrying about employee expense reporting. With the right mobile expense management technology, that automation can begin right on your employees’ smartphones. It may sound like a big leap, but it’s one that could make a huge difference for your organization. To prove it, here are some key benefits of automating employee expense reporting and mileage reimbursement workflows.

Benefits of Automating Employee Expense Reporting

Cost Savings

Let’s not beat around the bush. When considering any big adjustment to business management processes, one of the primary factors in that decision is how it will impact the organization’s finances. Likewise, one of the biggest benefits of using mobile technology to automate employee expense reporting is the ways in which it can help your business save money and cut costs. 

First, there’s the obvious way: digitizing a traditionally manual workflow saves on materials—paper, printers, and more. However, spreadsheets and emails only solve part of the problem. If you simply move manual processes online, you’re still creating a massive paper trail —you’ll just have to physically print out the paper later, once again costing time and money. 

Then there’s the other, less-obvious ways in which automating workflows can help lower costs. Traditional, manual submission and approval workflows could be costing you thousands of dollars every year without you even realizing it. This is the hidden cost of inefficiency.

 When employee expense reporting and expense approvals are conducted manually, these processes are subject to delays and bottlenecks every time a supervisor can’t approve an expense request because they’re on vacation, or every time a manager has to take the time to track down a lost or missing report. These delays cost money, and if you eliminate the opportunity for them to occur, you’ll be surprised at how much you save. 

Convenience

Another major benefit of automating expense reporting processes is the level of ease and convenience it allows employees at every level of the organization. Quite naturally, employees weigh their desire to be reimbursed against the effort required to get it. As we noted above, making the requirements for employee expense reporting too complicated runs the risk of employees not bothering to submit expense reports at all. 

Automation solves this problem. Expense management apps allow employees to submit reports directly from their smartphones, making employee expense reporting as convenient as possible. Automation removes the tedious data entry, ensuring a fast, easy, and efficient process. Employees just need to fill in any missed information and submit the report through the automated system. From there, it’s just a matter of waiting for reimbursement.

The technology itself is also convenient. Most mobile employees—and these days, most people in general—are already familiar with the ins and outs of using smartphones and other mobile devices. For someone who’s already used to having an app for just about anything, mobile expense management software should prove intuitive and easy to use.

Transparency and Accountability

Having expense reporting technology at their fingertips via their smartphone gives employees a greater degree of accountability. After all, it would be difficult for an employee to claim ignorance of a process or procedure when they can easily look it up on a device they keep on their dashboard or in their pocket at all times during the workday. Mobile systems encourage accountability and compliance, centralizing and storing important data and documents to maximize accessibility for users. 

Automating employee expense reports also facilitates accountability within the workplace by giving leadership transparent oversight into employee behavior. Unlike with slower, more inefficient processes, automated expense reporting generates data almost immediately. This gives management and supervisors valuable information on employees’ reporting and other activities and a fuller, more accurate look at how the business is functioning.

Fraud Prevention

The oversight that automated mobile expense reporting gives leadership can also help them take steps to find and prevent examples of fraudulent mileage reporting and other noncompliant behavior. Unlike other more traditional ways of managing employee expense reporting workflows, automated systems let supervisors set up parameters for flagging noncompliant or concerning employee behavior. 

Managers who suspect fraud or theft no longer have to painstakingly comb through expense reports. Instead, they can set their expense management software to alert them when employees submit duplicate reports, or try to claim reimbursement for ineligible travel, like commuting. 

Scalability

As an organization grows, the inefficiencies of poor processes grow with it. If you’re handling employee expense reporting manually, a huge spike in growth in your business could cause instability. If you hire a large number of new employees or add a department to your fleet of mobile employees, you might not have the infrastructure to meet that growth when it comes to processing, approving, and issuing reimbursement payments.

Automation sidesteps this problem entirely. One of the greatest advantages of automated systems is their scalability. Whether your organization is large or small, mobile expense management apps scale to meet the needs of your workforce, allowing for streamlined processes and flexible growth. 

CompanyMileage Means Convenience for Employees, Savings For You

For companies seeking the best way to automate employee expense reporting, look no further than CompanyMileage! Our suite of software solutions are specifically designed to automate the entire mileage reimbursement process, from mileage tracking, to employee expense reporting, all the way through reimbursement and approval. 

Using our mobile app, SureMobile, employees can upload receipts, plan and organize trips, edit and submit expense reports, and view expense information from anywhere using their mobile devices. Unlike other mileage reimbursement options, our automated system uses point-to-point calculation to determine trip mileage for reimbursement, eschewing the need for odometer readings and complicated mileage calculations. With our Quick Capture feature, users can simply tap their screen, and SureMobile will save their geo-location as well as the date and time, making mileage tracking and employee expense reporting that much easier. 

At the end of the day, employees simply take a few minutes to organize their trips, add any receipts or information as needed, and then they can submit expense reports right there through the app. From there, expense reports move through an automated approval workflow, which can be customized to meet the unique needs of your organization. Once approved, our software integrates with all major accounting and payroll systems for fast, seamless reimbursement.

Expense report automation is the future, and mobile expense management makes it accessible to nearly any organization. To learn how CompanyMileage can help you save money while improving the ease and efficiency of your employee expense reporting, contact us for a demo today!