Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Improve Expense Reporting With Online Expense Report Software

Expense reporting is an inevitable activity. Employees travel, and when they do so on business purposes, the organization has to reimburse them. This process of reporting and reimbursement can be simple and straight forward or be a tedious task that is riddled with inefficiencies. Unfortunately, today, many organizations still manage their expenses using manual expense management practices. Manual expense reporting can be lengthy, expensive, and inefficient; just a mundane activity like the physical movement of paper requests and reports from one desk to another proves these points. There are a myriad other activities that have to be performed and these can seriously magnify the inefficiencies.

The solution to this inefficiency and the way to make the expense management process simple and straight forward is to deploy online expense report software. As mentioned earlier, there are a number of activities involved in expense management. The traveling employee prepares tentative pre-trip expense reports which have to be approved by a supervisor. Once the employee finishes the trip, post-trip expense claim reports are to be prepared and submitted to the concerned department. These claims then have to be verified and checked for adherence to company travel and expense policy. Once it passes through all these steps, the employee is then reimbursed.

All these activities, when done manually, increase the time taken for processing whereas expense report software significantly decreases the processing time. There is no need for any paper pushing by any employee; the entire process can be carried out online. An online signature software solution can be integrated with the expense management solution to accelerate the process of adding signatures to documents. Users simply sign online on soft copies instead of making wet signatures on paper documents. Another reason expense management is tedious is that the number of stakeholders involved in the process use their own methods and systems. The supervisor might want the pre-trip request in a mail instead of on paper, the accounting team might like a paper report, or the employee might use a different format of reporting than what was initially agreed. In such a scenario, everyone suffers because they now have to duplicate data. Visibility also suffers because of the sheer number of different systems the data has to be collected from. There is no convenient way to create reports either.

With online expense report software, though, there is no scope for this. It is an end to end system which manages all aspects of expense reporting. From the employee to the accounting professional, everyone logs in with their credentials and uses the same system. Be it the routing of the workflow, the formats, the policies of reporting, or the procedures, everything is streamlined. As all the expense management-related activity is confined to one system, there is no issue of lack of visibility either. The software comes with a reporting feature that allows you to make sense of all the data. You can create different reports with a few simple clicks. So, what do you say? Are you ready to shift to expense report software?

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