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.
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Our choice of Chrome River EXPENSE was made in part due to the very user-friendly interface, easy configurability, and the clear commitment to impactful customer service – all aspects in which Chrome River was the clear winner. While Chrome River is not as large as some of the other vendors we considered, we found that to be a benefit and our due diligence showed that it could support us as well as any large players in the space, along with a personalized level of customer care.
We are excited to be able to enforce much more stringent compliance to our expense guidelines and significantly enhance our expense reporting and analytics. By automating these processes, we will be able to free up AP time formerly spent on manual administrative tasks, and enhance the role by being much more strategic.
