As business travel becomes more popular, managing business travel expenses becomes increasingly difficult. Factors driving the rise include the gradual improvement in business confidence and ongoing economic globalization. In such a complex situation, it is even more problematic and crucial for finance professionals to have a reliable, simple, and effective way to control and monitor their organization’s business travel expenses. It becomes even more challenging and essential for finance professionals to possess a dependable, uncomplicated, and efficient means to regulate and supervise their company’s business travel expenditures, preferably through an expense management system.
Businesses continue to rely on old and traditional manual methods of managing business travel expenses. Everything was fine in the past, but times have changed, and the competitive business environment has created problems that will negatively impact business operations and profitability. So, let’s dive into business travel expense management system problems and how to address them.
Company T&E Management Challenges & their Solutions
Receipt Tracking and Management
Organizations must always ensure that employees submit expense reports with appropriate receipts to comply with regulations. Because expense receipts serve as proof of expenditure and are essential for tax audits. In these cases, the finance teams would be solely responsible for collecting, verifying, and documenting these receipts and reports. They manually identify and resolve issues involving multiple people and various expenses. This leads to a highly inefficient way of managing business expenses with no visibility on them.
Travel and expense management system helps you maintain all your employees’ travel reports and expense receipts digitally in one place. You can view the trip reports from anywhere at any time with any device. It also performs an automatic check to ensure the compliance of company’s policies in the reports updated by the employees.
Frustration With Uncertain Travel and Expense Policies
Is your policy on travel and expenses clear and detailed? When it does not, it is important to note that it contributes to employee frustration and a slow reimbursement processing time. This means that valuable time is being wasted on something that could have been avoided in the first place.
Businesses can use expense tracking software to help enforce policies based on designation, business goals, type of business expense, and other parameters. It automates your entire expense management process once you set up your approval workflow and integrate your T&E policies into the software.
It Takes Too Long to Review and Approve Expense Reports
Employees and finance teams alike can find expense management tasks frustrating. For example, they need to keep track of their travel expenses and accurately enter all information in an expense report template to be reimbursed on time. After employees submit their travel reports, finance teams must collate all manager travel reports and manually identify claims that do not meet your travel and expense policies. In the event of a policy violation, the finance team must return all or part of the trip report to the employee for necessary changes or clarifications. This can be an expensive and time-consuming process.
OCR technology in modern expense software scans receipts, extracts important data and automatically fills out a digital expense report in a short time. This reduces the number of manual data entry tasks for traveling employees while eliminating human error. This is especially useful for quick reviews, approvals, and audits.
Final Words
The business world is constantly evolving to become more responsive to the needs of employees. Automating your travel and expenses can benefit your business and employees. Zaggle EMS uses digitization to optimize the reimbursement of your employees. Use Zaggle’s expense tracking software to easily capture, ping and approve expenses. Schedule a demo today to see how it can help solve your spend management problems.
