How To Control Employee Expenses During Remote Work?

The pandemic caused businesses of all sizes to hit their reset buttons regarding how they worked, processed expenses, or even carried out day-to-day business operations. 

For Finance teams, though, this meant a need to start from scratch while handling employee or business expenses. In addition, with increased physical distance, traditional financial processes no longer seemed to cut.

As a business owner, you might be asking yourself, where do I begin improving my financial processes?

To answer this question, we’ve crafted the following article that elaborates on the various ways in which an expense management software can enable you to improve your core financial functions while also letting you manage remote expenses efficiently.

Let’s begin!

What challenges did remote work bring for traditional expense management?

  • The success of a spreadsheet-based expense reporting model largely depends on the accuracy of your employees entering the correct values into expense reports. A single incorrect expense report would result in increased TATs for reimbursements, numerous back and forths between your Finance teams and employees, and additional costs to the business. 

While employees could just randomly meet one another while in the office for clarifications, going remote has severed this ease of communication, making the clarifications happen mainly through email.

  • Additionally, the existence of any intentional or unintentional error means that Finance teams need to thoroughly verify every individual expense report to ensure that no erroneous or fraudulent reports get through. This, when done in the long run, can be quite a time-consuming process for Finance teams, resulting in overworked employees who might become passive about the process.
  • Preventing expense fraud would fall entirely on the shoulders of your Finance team. Honestly, this is a huge responsibility as even a minor slip-up can severely hurt company finances in the long run.
  • All this leads to business leaders and Finance teams having no control over business expenses across the company. This leads to financial leaks, fraudulent expenses, and bad business decisions.

When coupled with missed deadlines, erroneous reports, and manual processing, such challenges can dampen your financial productivity. Therefore, companies need to leverage the power of automation technology to reduce the burden on Finance teams which can help them stay afloat during these uncertain times.

How does an expense management software control employee expenses?

  • Automates the entire expense management process with ease

An expense management software helps reduce the tedious and cumbersome processes for your Finance teams. Additionally, with the software doing all the heavy lifting, any one-week process can now get condensed into a one-click wonder. Here’s how:

  • Employees can submit and track their business expenses from anywhere at any time and by using any device.
  • OCR technology helps extract data accurately from expense reports; thus, preventing data entry errors.
  • Provides advanced insights into spending patterns, habits, and top policy violators across the organization.
  • Easy storage and retrieval of all financial data to make IRS audits a breeze.
  • Easily enforce expense policies to ensure strict compliance

 Even after having the most straightforward expense policies, companies struggle with compliance due to ineffective communication and weak means of enforcement. This, if left unchecked, can lead to overspending in numerous areas along with frequent policy violations. 

An expense report software has a robust policy engine that enables Finance teams to create custom business rules as per the needs of your business. In addition, the software enforces compliance by automating pre-submissions checks to inform employees of policy violations right away.

This makes it easier for employees as they do not need to remember policies but can still submit compliant reports on time. In addition, it eliminates the numerous back and forths between Finance teams and employees and ensures that your business is always audit-ready.

  • Efficiently manages company-wide expenses

Each department in your company will have various categories, cost-centers, and reasons behind their business expenditure. While this wouldn’t matter to your employees, your Finance teams would be clueless about the larger aspect of business expenses.

An expense management software helps you address these issues by providing your Finance department with a real-time expense dashboard that contains all the necessary breakdowns and live details of company-wide expenses at zero additional effort. 

This ensures that your Finance teams are always in the loop concerning business expenses, whether remote or otherwise.

  • Prevents expense fraud 

“85% employees across the U.S agree to have lied on an expense report” Pymnts Report.

This roughly translates into companies losing around $150 million annually on fraudulent reports alone. It needs to be stopped.

An expense software seamlessly enforces compliance by automating pre-submission checks. Additionally, it flags all non-compliant expenses and informs employees and approvers right away. This ensures that no fraudulent claims get by with zero additional or manual effort from your Finance teams.

Conclusion

While traditional expense management can give you little to no control over your business expenses, an expense management software can automate your entire pre-accounting to simplify your expense management process.

Businesses across the globe have begun to adopt an expense management software to help them better manage their remote expenses. It’s time for your business as well.

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