6 Best Practices for Reducing Expense Fraud

Expense fraud can happen at even the best-run organizations, but your company can definitely arm itself with the tools to rein it in. Those tools consist of a number of expense management best practices used by world-class organizations across the globe. While you’ll want to adapt and tailor the best practices to fit your specific industry and company, these best practices can serve as general guidelines to get you well on your way to eliminating business expense fraud.

Related: Proformative Webinar – Best Practices for Minimizing Expense Fraud

Eradicate all manual expense reporting solutions

With so many streamlined expense reporting solutions on the market, there is absolutely no reason you should still be processing manual expense reports. Global expense report software helps reduce costs, improve accuracy, enhance consistency – and prevent fraud.

Require pre-approvals

Before any employee spends any amount of money, require pre-approval for all expenses to ensure they’ll be reimbursed. You may be amazed at how much more careful employees will be with their spend when they know it’s being reviewed. As a cost-savings technique, this strategy finds a way to avoid costs before they’re incurred.

Launch a corporate card program

Many corporate card programs come packed with benefits, such as rebates, elimination of cash advances and reduction of falsified receipts. They also save time and headaches when it comes time to reconcile charges.

Automate policy enforcement

Top expense reporting solutions allow you to build your compliance rules right into the system, which are validated in real-time when a user enters new expenses. Employees are reminded of rules for hotel budgets, per diems and other items just by entering their expenses.

Clearly illustrate the approval process

Instead of wondering where their expense reports are and when they might be approved, give employees an overview of the approval process. Many global expense management solutions map out the process and show employees where their reports are in the process.

Centralize the travel expense process

When expense reports and all their related tasks and functions are performed through a single, global expense system, benefits abound. You reduce the need for human intervention, automatically reducing the risk of human error. You cut costs while increasing operational efficiency.  No more “Is that a 3?” or “That’s a big dinner charge – how many customers were there?”

Related: 10 Ways to Prevent Business Expense Fraud

You also have the power to streamline the entire expense process by integrating your global expense reports software with other travel-related tools. Many advanced expense reporting solutions can automatically transfer hotel folio charges, Uber trips and other pertinent data.

These six tips are known as best practices for a reason. And there are even a few others to add to the list. Check out our white paper on 10 Expense Management Best Practices for additional information on how to cut costs, improve compliance and run expense fraud right out of town.