Why Expenses Shouldn’t Have to Be So Painful

Submitting expense reports has long been one of those tasks, like filing taxes, that everyone loves to put off as long as possible - only delaying and worsening the challenge that lies ahead. The longer you wait, the more lines you need to type into the spreadsheet, and the more receipts you need to attach to the printout. Eventually, the need to get the thousands of dollars back into your bank account surpasses your dread, and you spend your weekend hunched over a laptop and a roll of tape.

Related: The Top 10 Perils of Using a Manual Expense Process

Even the introduction of expense management solutions didn’t fully resolve this issue. While solutions made it easier and faster to get images of receipts from the traveler’s wallet to the administrator’s PC, they still left a large number of manual steps at both ends of the process. Customers found them difficult to use and unintuitive. 

To counter these challenges, forward-thinking expense solution providers have focused their efforts on improving the customer experience for business travelers, approvers and financial teams alike. Just because submitting expenses is mandatory to be reimbursed doesn’t mean that organizations should have to be stuck with archaic, unintuitive and unfriendly solutions. An expense solution that can humanize the process and reduce the level of frustration at all levels will score big marks for the organizations’ CFOs and CIOs that champion the initiative.

Related: 5 Key Questions to Ask on your Expense Management RFP

Analyst firm Gartner recently released an interesting piece of research that addressed this exact topic, titled How to Improve Employee Expense Management⁽¹⁾. Based on interviews with organizations that have installed expense solutions, it looks at the challenges and frustrations that organizations face in their expense process, and what the executives would like to see done to resolve them. We believe the research note addresses these issues, and also identifies some of the key things that organizations should consider when looking for a new expense management solution. Some of the key findings include:

• Employee experience is quickly becoming a key design principle for expense management vendors

• A best-of-breed solution is usually the more appropriate choice for midsize to large organizations, versus an ERP’s expense module

• Unified payment/card and expense solutions are emerging that can help streamline the expense process, especially for organizations with large numbers of non-employee expenses

Related: Capterra, GetApp Reviews Crown Chrome River as the User Favorite in Expense Management Software

If you’re considering an expense solution - whether you’re looking to move away from a manual, spreadsheet-based solution or are looking to replace your legacy system - this research provides a great overview on what to look for. 

1. Gartner, How to Improve Employee Expense Management, Chris Pang, 6 February 2020