Why Should You Merge T&E Expense Approval and Payroll Processes?

Your mobile employees have finally done it. They’ve worked hard at their jobs, while keeping careful IRS-compliant logs of the mileage they’ve driven for work in their personal vehicles, painstakingly calculated the miles they’ve driven, and have submitted expense reports to management. Now all that stands between them and their much-deserved reimbursement payment? The expense approval process. 

Depending on how your organization structures expense approval and reimbursement processes, however, that final step might be a hard hurdle to jump. If handled improperly, the expense approval process can get weighed down by missing paperwork, bottlenecks, personnel issues, and who knows what else. That’s before even arriving at the actual process of reimbursement, and if your organization isn’t equipped to handle approvals properly, then how can your mobile workforce expect fast, accurate reimbursement payments? 

The problem can be a sticky one, which is why CompanyMileage and its suite of software solutions for mileage reimbursement are specially designed to be the perfect workforce planning tools for organizations who want to streamline and perfect mileage reimbursement for mobile employees using their personal vehicles. CompanyMileage automates everything from mileage logs to expense approval, and we don’t stop there.

In this article, we discuss the top five reasons your organization should optimize the approval and reimbursement process by reimbursing T&E through payroll, but first let’s talk about manual processes and why we’re ready to leave them in the past. 

Automation is Everything 

We live in the future. That’s why restaurant menus are all online, we can watch movies on our phones, and your company’s workforce can be constantly on the move across the globe, instead of stationary in an office building. And if our world is increasingly digital, why shouldn’t the way you reimburse employees for business travel and other work-related expenses embrace the best that technology has to offer?

Ultimately, when your mobile employees are on the job, whether that be in sales, healthcare, or any other field, they should feel like they have the ability to focus entirely on doing their work, while trusting that they will be reimbursed fairly for the expenses they incur. That’s why you should leave their job duties to them, they should lead management to you, and the nitty-gritty of expense approval should be left to us, and the intuitive software we’ve designed specifically to ensure that employees are reimbursed quickly and fairly, with as little room for human error as possible. 

Top 5 Reasons to Merge Expense Approval and Payroll Processes

Consolidation

A major reason to reimburse employees’ travel and expenses costs through payroll is that at the end of the day it’s so much more efficient. Why should your management and your employees have to use a separate process, system or software for regular reimbursement payments when they can simply utilize their existing payroll structure? Reimbursing travel and expenses through payroll means consolidating expense approval and reimbursement payments into one simple, direct workflow. 

Instead of submitting a report, waiting for approval and then eventually waiting again to receive reimbursement through a long, unorganized, unwieldy process, consolidating reimbursement and payroll allows employees to receive mileage reimbursement payments through an existing structure they already understand, and on which they already rely for their regular paychecks. And that system already has their payment information, facilitating direct deposit reimbursements directly into their bank accounts. 

Clarity

A good rule of thumb for running a business that has a large mobile or remote workforce: Make all vital processes as clear as possible. If there’s a chance for employees to miss something, they absolutely will. And if there’s a chance for some important documentation or information to slip through the cracks of an inefficient reimbursement process, it absolutely will. (Unfortunately, Murphy’s Law, that anything can go wrong will, generally at the worst possible time, applies in full force in the business landscape). Best to give yourself as little room for error as possible. 

A great reason to reimburse T&E through your company’s payroll system is that it creates and enforces the clarity that a good expense approval process needs to thrive. When employees receive their reimbursement payments through payroll, it creates a tangible timeline for that reimbursement. Company payroll systems provide consistent pay periods with beginning and end dates. Structuring the reimbursement process around those payments makes employee deadlines for expense submissions clear, leaving little room for ambiguity – and no excuse for late or missing payments. 

Internal Controls

When there’s not enough oversight in a company’s approvals and reimbursement processes, that company opens itself up to scams, embezzlement, and, of course, fraud. Unfortunately, fraud in the form of submitting ineligible mileage for reimbursement, inflating existing mileage, or just wholesale making up numbers aren’t uncommon. Integrating payroll with travel and expenses reimbursement gives your organization access to CompanyMileage’s real-time data reporting as well as controls like the ability to flag problematic or noncompliant reporting behaviors. With that level of security in place, your organization is less likely to let fraud and embezzlement go unnoticed, or fall for scams like false vendors. 

And speaking of security, your company should always be thinking about data and information security, from smart business password practices to utilizing practiced, high-security systems, especially if your business occupies fields like healthcare, in which workers often deal with medical records and other private health information. One of the biggest benefits of using CompanyMileage to integrate payroll with T&E reimbursement is that in doing so, your expense approval and reimbursement processes receive the benefit of CompanyMileage’s highly secure systems. CompanyMileage employs a three-tiered cybersecurity system. 

The first level of protection is data encryption. The second level is separate, secure, highly-monitored servers with firewalls and regular backups. The third and final level consists of our several internal policies to ensure privacy and data protection. These include suppressing client names on generated reports, segregating address books, refusing to share customer data with third parties without consent, and only allowing authorized officials to access our systems. 

Centralized Data

Another reason you should make your life easier and use CompanyMileage to handle expense approval and mileage reimbursement through payroll is the way in which it makes important company data centralized and easily accessible. Most payroll systems make this integration simple, allowing users to import data without requiring additional keying, while CompanyMileage provides the files. 

One of the reasons we believe so strongly in automating the reimbursement process is that we know how important it is for organizations to have easy access to reports, approvals, and other important records, whether for reference or in case your organization needs to prove an audit trail for the IRS at any point. Reimbursement through payroll highly simplifies the process, while still keeping all the records you need (or may need at some point) organized and accessible. 

Integration

The fifth and final reason you should consider reimbursing your organization’s travel and expenses payments through payroll? It’s just not that hard to do! CompanyMileage is compatible with all major financing and accounting systems. We’ve already provided integrations for the following systems: 

CompanyMileage has already provided integrations for seventy different payroll systems, including: Abilia, AccessSource, ADP, Ardmore, BDB, BlackBaud, Ceridian, Complete Payroll, CYMA, ExecuPay, Exponent HR, Financial Edge, FlexPay, GMS Accounting, Great Plains, Infinium, Kronos, Lawson, MAS 200, MIP, MPAY, MS Dynamics, MS Great Plains, MultiView, Navision, NetChex, Odyssey, Oracle, Paychex, PayChoice, PayCom, Paycor, Paylocity, Payroll Network, Peachtree, PrimePoint Payroll, Quantum Payroll, Sage Payroll, Solomon, TimeForce, TriNet, UtliPro, and Workday Finally.

Don’t see your payroll system on the list? It won’t be missing for long. Contact us and we’ll happily integrate it for free. 

Automating Expense Approval and Mileage Reimbursement is Easy With CompanyMileage

Don’t let a slow, inefficient expense approval process get in the way of your business. CompanyMileage’s suite of mileage reimbursement software addresses and neutralizes the shortcomings of processes typically associated with mileage reimbursement, automating and streamlining every step of the process. 

Instead of manually calculating mileage totals from odometer readings, mobile employees report the starting points and end destinations of all their work-related trips. The system then calculates the optimal route and driving distance between those two points, calculating expenses for reimbursement instead of attempting to verify the miles driven. Entering this information is quick and easy for employees, who can record trip data with the simple touch of a button using the SureMobile app on their smartphones. They just need to take a few minutes at the end of every workday to organize their trips, take pictures of any relevant receipts, and submit reports for review.

Once travel data is processed by SureMileage, it moves through a digital, streamlined expense approval workflow. This workflow is also highly customizable, to meet the needs of your business and its management structure. And finally, after supervisors review and approve expense reports, they move off to accounting and payroll, for a fast and easy reimbursement payment through your organization’s payroll system. 

Don’t wait a second longer to make your business’s T&E reimbursement as fast, accurate, and efficient as possible. To learn more, contact CompanyMileage and request a demo today!