Is your company still taking care of employee travel and expense management manually? It is time to leave this redundant practice that is not only costing your business money but also time that can be productively used to achieve business goals. Read this article for the top reasons why automating corporate travel expense management is the efficient way forward:

If spreadsheets, paper receipts, and multiple emails are an inexorable part of your company’s corporate travel and expense management, then you must consider automating these processes to reduce the burden on the company’s admin. Manually administering T&E management is prone to inconsistencies and errors that can heavily cost your business.

Automated processes can discard these issues, helping your company prioritize productivity, especially in the case of small business travel expense management. An automated workflow can further ensure that claims, approvals, and auditing can be streamlined and made smarter.

Additionally, if your company is availing of the services of a travel agent, it is bound to manually manage expenses that can always be prone to errors alongside involving too much paperwork and multiple back and forth. Hence, an automated single tool for expense management and travel solutions can easily take care of every aspect of business travel on a consolidated platform, easing the road to an effortless business travel.

Let us now understand the top reasons why investing in automated travel expense management can be beneficial for your company in overcoming the difficulties of manual processes. But first, let us consider the drawbacks of manual expenditure management, thus asserting why companies should make the transition towards automation:

Drawbacks of Manual Expense Management:

Managing the travel expense process manually can have several disadvantages. Here are the top reasons it is no longer a feasible option-

• Time-consuming processes that can take weeks, from the initial step of filing to finally getting approval.
• Lots of paperwork that includes saving receipts, attaching them to the expense report, getting approvals and finally getting validation from accounts.
• Tons of paperwork make it costly to sustain manual processes as storage becomes a problem.
• No way to keep track if an expense receipt gets lost or to know what is the approval status until it is finally approved.
• Manual processes make it very difficult to cross-reference and detect fraud.
• Many a time, employees simply ignore the policies while filing expenses because there is no visibility of policies, leading to violations.
• On the contrary, the finance team has to validate each expenditure with the expense policy in the lack of an online expense management software, making it cumbersome.
• No real-time reporting can make it difficult to analyse data that can further hamper the identification of challenges in expense reporting.
• Manual records of expenses are bound to have errors, and detecting these is nightmarish for the finance team, usually leaving them unnoticed.

The tedious processes associated with a manual expense management system can be stressful for the employees as well admins, thus making automation the need of the hour. Curious to know how to manage travel expenses in corporate? So, let us now analyse some of the reasons why companies need to automate their travel expense management:

Why Do Businesses Need to Automate Corporate Travel and Expense Management?

Deploying an automated solution for managing and reporting expenses simplifies the whole process while also making it error-free. 

Read on to understand the five advantages of automating employee expense management:

Travel and Expense Software Saves Time Spent on Paperwork and Reduces Errors:

Manual processes imply that employees need to record and save their receipts while out on business trips. On the other hand, the finance team has to verify and approve all the expenses, shifting through endless paperwork. This leaves room for many errors to occur. Automated processes owing to a travel expense software removes the need for any paperwork. It makes it easy to capture expense receipts via mobile phones, enabling employees to upload them directly to the application and submit the expense report after compilation for approval. There is hardly any scope of error, and even if there are any possible oversights, the finance team can easily track them, saving everyone’s time.

Employee Expense Management Increases Policy Compliance:

In the absence of a systematic process, enforcing and overseeing policy compliance can be a daunting task. This can be especially difficult in keeping track when multiple expenses flow in simultaneously. Every single expense would require to be manually verified against the policy, which means that some out-of-policy expenses can easily be overlooked, leading to unnecessary reimbursements by the finance department. It can, therefore, cost your company dearly due to employees’ policy violations.

Corporate expense solutions like myBiz can allow you to customize your expense management in accordance with the travel policies of your company, ensuring early detection of violations. They can even flag and notify the approving authorities of such violations, ensuring smoother management that will, in turn, be cost-saving.

Business Travel and Expense Management Software Eliminates Expense Fraud:

Following the above-mentioned benefit, one of the most important reasons to shift to an automated expense tool is to prevent expense fraud. When employees get the opportunity to manually submit their expenses, they make the most of the loopholes, the biggest being the lack of resources to keep track. The chaos ensued by the manual processing of expenses enables fraudulent activities as it makes it strenuous to detect suspicious claims.

An online expense management system can arrest this issue by identifying duplicate expenses and ensuring more transparency. It easily removes the temptation in employees to swindle because they know it can be tracked easily. Travel admins can also leave their worries about falsified receipts behind as the adoption of a travel expense management tool makes the entire process scam-free and error-free. 

Expense Management Tool Gives Visibility into Travel Spend:

When expenses are managed manually, there is no visibility in real-time, meaning there is no way to gain valuable insights from data that can be collected from expense submissions. An automated business expense management tool can extract real-time data, compile it into reports and send it to the stakeholders. They can curate extensive reports on every aspect of expenditure management, like spending patterns, policy violations, claims and reimbursements, etc. These reports can be analysed to arrive at informed decisions that can help you to negotiate better discounts and deals from suppliers, saving costs.

It is possible to collect data manually; however, there is no way to assure data accuracy, thus limiting the visibility of the company’s cash flows. On the contrary, travel and expense management tools monitor these cash flows diligently, helping you to track your organisation’s financial performance and taking your business to greater heights.

Automation Is a Cost-Efficient Expense Management Solution:

Often companies shy away from online travel and expense management system, continuing to stick to outdated manual processes because they expect them to be expensive. However, with a free expense management product like myBiz, you can instantly ensure all-around savings. It will be cost-effective, time-saving, error-free, and hassle-free. Since most of the data is directly imported from expenses, it is pre-populated in the claim, thus having no processing costs. Such products are easily implemented and conveniently accessed. The ease of reporting equates to greater insight into the spending and easy availability of data. Furthermore, there is no longer a need to invest in office stationery to keep track of endless expenses. Additionally, they are scalable, which means unlimited expense data can be easily stored for a long time as opposed to spending money on infrastructure.

The cost of the travel and expense management software, its implementation, or the need to deploy any resources to manage it is absent with an ideal expense management tool like myBiz. Therefore, automating expense management of your business has endless benefits that can save your company both time and money. Learn more about how to integrate and automate your business travel and expense management here.

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

 

Q1. Why is manual expense management expensive to sustain over time?

Ans. Manual expense management processes require many physical resources like stationery and bundles of paper that also need storage space which can be costly. Hence, switching to travel expense management software can easily diminish the need for physical resources by automating the entire process.

Q2. Why does policy compliance become challenging with manual expense management?

Ans. Most employees do not go through the travel policies while filing the expenses manually on paper or in spreadsheets. This can lead to employees ignoring the policies, thus violating them and becoming a challenge for corporate travel expense management.

Q3. What is the easiest way to curb fraud in travel expense processes?

Ans. Expense fraud can be significantly reduced by automating expense management solutions. It can detect duplicate entries and increase transparency with the help of customised approval flows and multiple review processes.

Q4. How can expense reporting online help decision-makers to scale their business?

Ans. Automated travel & expense management offer real-time data and reports that can help track spending trends. This insight can be used to make intelligent business decisions that can help a business grow by improving its overall budgeting and spending.

Related Blogs:

• •  Ultimate Guide to Expense Management for Businesses
• •  Challenges of Corporate Expense Management
• •  Discover the Top 5 Benefits of Expense Approval System
• •  Role of Effective Policy Enforcement in Corporate Expense Management
• •  Impact of Poor Expense Management on Corporates
• •  5 Ways to Control Business Travel Expenses