Why is Your Company STILL Doing Manual Expense Reporting?

We’re in 2019. Cars can drive themselves. You can order niche products on Amazon and have them delivered to your door the same day. You can tell your phone to play some obscure song from your youth that you’ve not even thought about in 30 years. So why are you still making your employees do their expenses using tape and printed spreadsheets?

Here’s our top 10 list of reasons why you need to move to the modern day with a mobile-first, award-winning expense automation solution.

1. Manual expenses are VERY inefficient for your travelers …  

Collecting receipts. Filling out spreadsheets. Taping receipts to paper. Sending in the intercompany mail system. Getting from a purchase to reimbursement isn’t a simple process.

2. … and for your finance team

Does your finance team know every detail of your travel policy? If not, they’ll have to cross-check every report to ensure they are compliant. And then there is typing all of the data manually into the finance system, which slows down the process and introduces the possibility of rekeying errors.

3. It’s difficult to analyze your spend data when it’s all on spreadsheets ...

Your organization could be losing many thousands of dollars by failing to analyze spend data and find efficiencies in your travel spend. When your this spend information is all held on spreadsheets, identifying efficiencies is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

4. … and travel policy compliance is hard to enforce

Expense automation solutions can be configured so that travelers can’t easily submit out-of-policy expenses, and built in pre-approvals with booking tool integration ensures that all travel is compliant with the company’s regulations. None of this is possible with manual processes.

5. Your travelers become less productive

If your travelers can’t do their expenses on-the-go using their tablets or phones, they have to spend time back in the office getting everything submitted. That’s time that takes your team away from the jobs they’re being paid to do.

6. You lose many of the benefits of corporate card programs

Corporate cards offer a wide range of benefits, from easier statement reconciliation to preventing card fraud, and stopping non-compliant or inflated purchases from being made. However, doing so requires the cards to be integrated into the expense solution.

7. Fraud is challenging to prevent

When spotting fraud is reliant upon the keen eye of an approver, who may have dozens of expense reports to review, it's a very hit-and-miss process. It becomes impossible to easily tell if an expense has been submitted before, if a tip has been inflated, or if someone has mixed in personal and business expenses.

8. Compliance with international VAT regulations becomes difficult

Keeping your finance team and travelers abreast of international tax regulations and ensuring they remain in compliance can be tricky without a centralized expense management solution. In addition, companies with global operations often spend millions of dollars on VAT, which can often be recovered. However, managing expenses manually makes this process almost impossible.

9. Quarter-end reporting can get delayed

Closing a financial period requires accurate and timely data. Expense reports which have been procrastinated over, or are stuck in the intercompany mail system make effective reporting difficult to achieve.

10. People hate doing their expenses.

I’ll let expense submitters speak for themselves on this one.