Your Expense Report Process Hurts Your Business (But You Can Fix It)

Expense reports. The company’s bureaucratic nightmare. Let’s not sugarcoat it—doing expense reports is a pain; however, expense reporting is a necessary part of any business. It’s how you keep track of your employee’s spending, see how they are spending money and where they are spending it. But the traditional expense report process can take a lot of time and add up to a lot of money. You spend days of your life doing something that you’d much rather be using to make your organization work smarter. If you aren’t currently re-evaluating this process in light of new technology—it is time to do so.

Your Reality: The Traditional Expense Report Process Takes Forever

If you’re relying on a traditional expense report process, employees have to remember when they spent money, keep track of receipts, scan them into the system and fill out forms by hand. This can result in less productivity and efficiency for your business, countless avoidable mistakes and errors, and frustration from employees who feel like they’re spending too much time on paperwork instead of getting things done. If your expense report process hasn’t changed to keep up with technology, you may be missing out on opportunities to improve your businesses bottom line. 

Filling out an expense report form isn’t the only part of the process that takes a lot of time. Many times, expense forms can get missed or forgotten about, meaning they don’t get paid in a timely manner. This tends to happen because employees are waiting for their managers or supervisors to approve their expenses before they can go to Accounting for processing. If you don’t have redundancies built into your process, one person’s delay can cause delays for everyone else involved in approving expenses. 

How Updating Your Expense Report Process Can Fix It

Updating your expense report process by automating the more routine tasks will make it faster. Employees won’t have to waste time filling out and submitting forms manually when they can do it virtually from their smartphones. All of the information they need will be easily accessible, and they’ll be able to quickly upload any supporting documents they have. Once submitted, their expense report will be automatically sent to the appropriate person in your approval sequence. The speed of filling out forms increases efficiency, which means employees can get back to work faster after submitting their expenses without worrying about 

Another benefit of automated expense reporting is the elimination of bottlenecks or delays in approving expense reports by ensuring stakeholders receive regular reminders. This means employees don’t have to worry about their reimbursements being delayed because someone got busy and let it slip their mind.

Your Reality: Manual Reports Are Prone to Errors

The traditional expense report process is prone to errors. Whether it’s a simple typo or a misunderstanding about what an expense is for, the traditional process can be fraught with mistakes. Errors can occur at any point in the expense reporting process:

• Employees may submit incorrect or fraudulent receipts.
• Employees may forget to submit their receipts or submit them late.
• Either intentionally or unintentionally, employees may submit duplicate receipts or duplicate expenses on different days.
• Employee travel data might be inaccurate due to typos, transcription mistakes, calculation errors, or other mistakes made during data entry.

These errors can cost companies thousands of dollars each year in overpayments and payroll costs from needing to correct them. 

How Updating Your Expense Report Process Can Fix It

When you use expense software, it reduces the negative impacts of human error significantly. You don’t have to worry about whether your employees know how much they should be spending on business travel or office supplies because they simply upload their expenses directly into the system and let it do all of the calculations for them. This also means that you don’t have to worry about them making mistakes in their reporting because everything was done automatically instead of manually.

Your Reality: Expense Fraud is Harder to Catch

In the 2022 Report to the Nations, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that expense report was the third most common form of occupation fraud. The most common type of expense report abuse was employees claiming personal or business expenses as a tax deduction. This is especially prevalent in industries where employees travel frequently, such as healthcare and technology. The second most common type of expense report abuse was employees submitting duplicate receipts or submitting false receipts altogether.

How Updating Your Expense Report Process Can Help

Automated expense reports are a great way to reduce fraud because they allow you to monitor your employees’ spending patterns for any unusual or suspicious purchases. This can help you catch fraud early and prevent it from spiraling out of control. Having an automated expense report process can help prevent expense report fraud by streamlining the expense report process and putting more controls in place to ensure that only legitimate expenses are reimbursed.

Your Reality: Data from Traditional Expense Reports is Untimely

Expense reports are one of the most important ways to keep track of your business expenses and make sure that you’re not spending too much on employee travel. They are an incredibly valuable source of information that can be used to improve decision-making, track spending, and even identify fraud.  Unfortunately, traditional expense reporting processes make it difficult for companies to collect accurate data. If you’re using inaccurate data to evaluate your spending habits, then you may be making decisions based on faulty information which could result in overspending or under-budgeting in the future.

How Updating Your Expense Report Process Can Fix It

When you automate the expense report process, you go from having a handful of people submit paper-based receipts to a digital system where all of your employees submit their expenses through an app. The benefit here is that your company will have more accurate data at its fingertips so that spending can be monitored more easily and employees know exactly what they’re allowed to spend. Tracking spending habits over time helps you identify where employees are wasting money so that adjustments can be made to reduce these unnecessary expenses.

Let CompanyMileage Fix Your Expense Report Process

We believe that companies and their employees deserve a better experience when it comes to expense reporting. That’s why CompanyMileage built our employee expense reimbursement solution, SureMileage. With our companion app, SureMobile, employees are able to log trips, save receipts and submit reports in just a few minutes. Expense reports automatically move through your approval workflow, meaning you’re saving time and money while helping eliminate bottlenecks, inaccuracies, and fraud. 

Want to learn how CompanyMileage can help fix your expense report process? Reach out to schedule a demo today.