Have you ever heard the expression, ‘knowledge is power’? Today, we can find proof of this truism in the immense amount of value businesses give their data. From helping companies know the effects of marketing, industry trends, or even employee satisfaction, having a firm grasp on data lets companies stay competitive. One area where its value is most evident is the expense reimbursement process. Every expense report form your employees submit has a wealth of information, including the who, where, what, why, and when of the expense. This information is vital for the approval process on a micro-level, but what lessons can we learn beyond that? With good expense report analytics, quite a few.

Lesson #1: Identifying Noncompliance 101

While the reimbursement process has often relied on mutual trust between employer and employee, almost 20% of expense reports need correcting, mistakes happen. While these mistakes are bound to happen, they can be costly and time-consuming. Mistakes aren’t the only reason an expense report may not comply with your company’s policies. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, expense fraud accounted for up to 20% of fraud faced by businesses. What is and isn’t fraudulent depends on your policy, but common examples of reimbursement fraud are:

  • Claiming Personal Expenses 
  • Exceeding Spending Limits
  • Claiming Disallowed Items
  • Inflating Overalls Costs
  • Filing False Expenses

Expense fraud such as this costs companies millions of dollars each year. Using software that provides reliable expense report analytics will let you better monitor the process for any persisting non-compliance issues. Expense software that gives you the ability to flag behaviors in the system can help identify patterns of noncompliance within your business such as how often it occurs, what types occur the most and at what stage in the process it occurs. Learning where and when noncompliance happens within the approval process will allow you to investigate and identify why it happens.

Lesson #2: Monitor Spending with Expense Report Analytics

With the traditional expense process, it can be difficult to identify patterns in spending. This can lead to some employees’ overspending or misunderstanding your company’s policies. Underspending can also be a symptom of an employee who doesn’t understand or isn’t comfortable with your company’s expense reimbursement process, leading to unreported expenses. Both of these can impact a business’s bottom line. 

Using the data gathered from your expense report analytics, you can identify the employees whose spending is outside the norm for their company or department. Doing this gives you the power to address the issue through better training, updating policies or communicating with the employee one-on-one.

Lesson #3: Locating Your Process Bottlenecks

It isn’t only mistakes, overspending or fraud that can inflate the cost of reimbursing your employee’s expenses. Even if those factors disappeared, it cost businesses an average of $58 to process an expense report. However, there are several stages; submission, review, verification, and approval; encountering a bottleneck at any of them can dramatically increase that cost. When the process stalls, it can result in lost documents, unpaid employees, and even inaccurate budgeting.

To help find where approval slows, ask these questions while looking at your expense report analytic:

  1. How long does the average approval take? Find how long it takes on average or an expense report to make its way through the process. This will let you find instances that fall outside of the normal and investigate them.
  2. Where is getting held up? Having an eagle-eye view of the entire process will allow you to locate the approval stalls at what stage in the process. 
  3. What made approval slower? After finding the stages where it slows, identify the factors that took more time.
  4. What made approval faster? Investigate the expense reports approved in less time than the average and look for clues as to why the process moved more quickly.

Answering these questions will help you make the necessary changes to your approval process. For example, if you encounter bottlenecks in the approval process, expense report analytics can help identify the commonalities and provide you with the knowledge needed to improve your systems. Do you need more redundancies at certain stages? Are reminders needed? Is there a need for more training? Knowing where the problems are will give you the tools to fix them.

Lesson #4: Find the Software that Works for Your Business

The process for reimbursing employees for expenses has traditionally been based on a system that gives the employee no visibility and the employer no certainty—this lack of visibility results in a confusing and stressful environment. Thankfully we don’t have to be tied down to tradition. Using expense management software to track your expense report analytics helps clear the fog and allows for a transparent, secure, and efficient expense approval process. It gives employees the security to know they will be reimbursed quickly and the businesses confidence knowing that their payments are for legitimate expenses and not mistakes or fraud.

CompanyMileage’s integrated suite of products—SureMileage, SureMobile and SureExpense—is an accurate and secure system for expense reimbursement management.  We provide you unprecedented visibility over your reimbursement process—giving managers the data about your expense process, allowing them to identify and fix opportunities. Its ability to improve visibility into T&E expenses means that the process improvement continues over time.

With CompanyMileage, you’ll never need to return to the old ways of processing expense reports SureMileage—and its sister products, SureMobile and SureExpense—move all processes to a web-based solution. CompanyMileage’s ability to integrate with the organization’s payroll and accounting system makes the reimbursement process almost entirely effortless for employees. Our software brings accuracy and automation to the process from submission to reimbursement, reducing the time spent managing expenses to just a few minutes a day for your mobile employees. With a multi-level reimbursement approval process, automated reminders and custom workflows, you can reduce the time it takes to process your company’s expense reports. 

If you want software designed to leverage the power of data to reduce fraud and increase efficiency while managing the reimbursement process more effectively, request a demo with CompanyMileage today!