Top 5 Must-Have Features in an Expenses Reporting Tool

Running a business in any industry comes with operational challenges that can trip up even the most experienced teams. For companies with a large number of mobile or remote employees, expenses reporting is often one of those hidden pitfalls—easy to overlook, but risky to ignore.

Think about it: if your organization’s guidelines for documenting and reporting work-related expenses are too relaxed, you’re inviting trouble. This is especially true for mobile employees, who naturally operate with less day-to-day oversight than in-office staff. Without strong expense reporting practices in place, it becomes much harder to catch mistakes, prevent fraud, or ensure compliance. 

Poor documentation can lead to issues with the IRS, while vague or overly simple procedures increase the risk of fraud and financial mismanagement. On the other side of this tightrope, overly complex procedures for expense reporting might discourage overwhelmed employees from submitting reports altogether, which has its own risks. Either way, your business is left exposed.

Luckily, as the world of business gets more expansive and complex, it also becomes more technologically advanced. Now more than ever, it’s easy to find software and other automated tools purporting to be the perfect solution for businesses looking to efficiently manage expenses reporting for their mobile workforce. 

However, this raises another issue: If there’s no shortage of available tools for optimizing travel and expense reporting, how do you choose the right one? Software shopping can be a game of give and get when it comes to useful features. Does anyone have them all?

To help navigate this thorny issue, we’ve compiled a list of five things to look for in potential software solutions for reporting business expenses. 

Visibility

One of the biggest boons of using automated and digital tools for reporting work expenses? It completely eliminates some of the biggest issues with slow, manual, and inefficient processes. The worst of these ineffectual processes lack visibility, making it all-too-easy for expense fraud, inaccurate data, and lost or incomplete reports to slip through the cracks of reporting processes, going unnoticed and unprevented. 

Operational visibility adds clarity to the planning and budgeting processes that can make all the difference for an organization hoping for a good year instead of tight times. The perfect solution for your organization’s expenses reporting procedures should center visibility through every step of expense reporting and reimbursement, encouraging and enforcing employee accountability while allowing management and supervisors to maintain oversight of mobile workers’ business expenditures. 

Besides supporting a clear and organized workflow, the best automated expenses reporting solutions should facilitate visibility by providing means of organizing and analyzing the spending data collected by the software. Basic tools for reporting and analysis often fail to deliver insight deep enough to properly drive cost savings and budget optimization within a business. Your company’s decision-makers need comprehensive, real-time analytics to strategically analyze and manage company spending. This will let them make informed decisions about the company’s expenses, and identify any areas that require improvement.

Accuracy

Another area where digital expenses reporting tools can improve upon manual T&E workflows? The ways in which automated systems can increase and maintain accuracy throughout every step of the process. Inaccurate reporting can be the death knell for a company’s finances, its legal compliance, and its reputation. Humans are naturally prone to error, and requiring employees to manually calculate and report expenses, such as mileage from personal vehicle use, opens your business up to the possibility of errors such as misentered data, calculation errors, and duplicate reporting.

Instead, using software to manage expenses reporting prioritizes accurate, efficient data. The best solutions for expense management and reimbursement should take advantage of technological tools by smoothly digitizing all major processes, within a workflow that your company can customize to best meet its existing structure. Automating expenses reporting eliminates the possibility for human error and human bias to factor into your organization’s expenses reporting systems. 

The best expense reporting tools can also offer an additional layer of protection by finding and flagging inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the reporting process. Your company’s expense management software should be able to identify non-compliant claims, ferret out odometer fraud and mileage padding, and reduce errors on both sides of the process through automation.

Mobility

As manual mileage logs and paper expense reports go the way of the dinosaurs, so too do the traditional ways in which the business landscape conceptualizes the average employee. More and more workers for organizations in fields like delivery and healthcare have gone mobile. These busy workers that undertake the day-to-day duties of their jobs out in the field aren’t tied to a desk, so their expense management tools shouldn’t be either! 

Instead, look for digital T&E management solutions that offer mobile capability, so that your on-the-go-workforce can compile and send reports while, well, on-the-go! Pretty much everyone has a smartphone these days, or at least knows how to use one, so why not take advantage of that fact with your organization’s expense reporting software?

Mobile features in reporting tools help reduce the delays created when employees hang onto receipts and other relevant expense information. Mobile management offers additional savings over office-based tools, but the key to getting those savings is employee adoption. A solution has to deliver the same simplicity and ease of use that employees have come to expect from their other mobile applications.

Security

Many mobile workers, especially those in the health care fields, have the responsibility of handling patient health information (PHI) and other important private data over the course of their workdays. This is where manual processing of expense reimbursement can prove not only slow and costly, but potentially dangerous, as well. Manual expenses reporting tools fail to address the need for HIPAA compliance in employee reimbursement, and other legal issues surrounding T&E management. 

From a security standpoint, technology offers businesses a huge boost. Modern software solutions take employee and company records out of dusty cubicles and filing cabinets and instead centralize that information in the cloud, where it can be both more secure and more accessible.The solution your organization chooses should have these features, as well as protected and encrypted systems and policies for data and password protection. 

Compatibility 

Every business seems to have done it once: invested in new software only to find that it doesn’t perform as well as expected with products already in use. What good is a cutting-edge digital solution for expenses reporting and reimbursement if it isn’t compatible with existing tools? Instituting an automated workflow for expenses reporting that lacks full integration with your organization’s systems could cause operational bottlenecks, slowing everything down for workers trying to file expense claims, as well as for members of management who review and approve those claims. 

Additionally, if your expense management system doesn’t integrate well with the systems for finance and accounting already in use by your company, that lack of compatibility could complicate data transfer, resulting in possible inaccuracies, wasted time, and possibly even delayed reimbursement payments. 

Instead, the right automated solutions for expenses reporting within your organization should be integrated from end-to-end, so it doesn’t miss a step when your employees start to put it to use. This integration should include booking, expense reporting, employee reimbursement and expense analysis.

CompanyMileage Has The Tools You Need to Perfect Expenses Reporting 

For decades, expense reporting was a one-way street. Employees made claims that businesses paid. Companies could make rules and impose limits in the form of expense policies, but it was all-too-easy for errors and fraudulent behavior to go unchecked. With automation, reimbursements still flow out, but information flows in – information that can improve compliance, budgeting, and most importantly, expense management.

CompanyMileage takes automation one step further still by approaching expenses reporting for mileage reimbursement in a new way. Rather than verifying the miles that were driven, SureMileage calculates the expenses to be reimbursed. Employees report their starting point and destination and the system calculates the driving distance between them. 

SureMobile, our mobile app, makes it easier than ever for employees to upload trip data and manage trips while on the go. At the end of their workday, employees just have to take a few minutes to organize their trips and take photos of any relevant receipts, and then they can submit expense reports right from their smartphones. 

From there, our system moves expense reports through your customizable automated approval workflow. Once reports are approved, our software automates all major accounting and approval systems, guaranteeing fast, accurate reimbursement payments every time. 

SureMileage by CompanyMileage is trusted by hundreds of organizations to cut mileage reimbursement expenses by 20% to 30%. Why? Because our unique approach—and the solution built around it—checks all the must-have boxes. Want to see it in action? Contact us for a demo today!