Businesses traditionally relied on manual expense reporting for expense report compliance and managing company spending. However, company expenses increase as a business grows. It is no longer practical for the company to continue manual expense reporting through Excel or paper.
Organisations may need to adopt an automated system to hit business targets—monitor expense report compliance, manage the increasing reimbursement volumes, and empower employees and finance teams to focus on value-adding tasks.
This article will discuss the challenges of traditional expense reporting and how an automated expense management system helps address these issues and ensure expense report compliance.
Challenges of Traditional Expense Reporting for Growing Businesses
Businesses may face challenges when employing traditional expense reporting. These difficulties may be present in your company, too.
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Too many physical receipts
A manual expense reporting system requires you to review physical receipts to verify spending information. This process is often time-consuming since filing, searching, and storing physical receipts involve manual labor.
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Absence of spending control and tracking mechanism
A manual expense reporting system doesn’t let you control employee spending and track business expenses. This disadvantage makes budgeting and expense management challenging. It can also delay accounting’s financial close process and increase the chances of errors, overspending, or fraud.
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Too many manual processes
Employing a traditional expense reporting process entails manual reviews, checks, and data inputs for your finance team. These activities take time and can distract your employees from working on core business functions.
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Too much time spent in the approval process
A lengthy approval process is another downside to a traditional expense reporting system, leading to reimbursement delays. Reports pass through multiple approval levels. The cycle may repeat itself if someone identifies an error somewhere along the process.
A Modern Solution to Managing Employee-initiated Expenses
Traditional expense reporting may have worked in the past. However, today’s fast-paced and high-tech business world requires automation of business processes. Implementing an automated expense management system would help solve the issues discussed above.
Here are the most significant benefits of automating your expense reporting system.
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Reduces the amount of manual work and time spent through process automation
Automating your expense management system allows your finance team to process and send payouts anytime, anywhere.
Here’s how the system works: the software’s optical character recognition (OCR) feature can extract information from a receipt and immediately create an expense item ready for submission. This “receipt capture” functionality helps expedite the expense reporting process and reduces instances of human error.
Spenmo is an all-in-one expense management software with the tools your team needs—multi-currency dashboards, automated bills payment feature, employee expense claims functionality, and free payroll disbursement feature.
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Avoids fraud and out-of-policy spending
Integrating an expense management solution into your processes enables you to create multiple safeguards that prevent fraud while managing your organisation’s spending.
For instance, Spenmo’s corporate cards have pre-approved budgets to ensure employee spending doesn’t exceed the acceptable limit. The cards also contain security features that allow you to set merchant locks for a more controlled company spending.
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Gives real-time visibility of employee-initiated expenses
An expense management software like Spenmo consolidates all expense data into one dashboard, enabling you to monitor all transactions as they happen in real-time.
The platform’s compatibility with accounting software allows you to manage the end-to-end expense process more efficiently— from expense report creation and submission to payout reconciliation and approvals.
Innovating Expense Reporting
The business world has significantly evolved with technology. The once tedious and time-consuming financial tasks are now more manageable with automation. In particular, expense management software speeds up expense reporting tasks with utmost data accuracy.
Spenmo is ideal for improving your organisation’s expense report compliance. This end-to-end payables software brings internal spend management, automated bill payments, custom approval flows, and accounting reconciliation into an integrated view.
Spenmo's vision is to provide businesses with visibility, comfort and control over how, when, and why money leaves your company. Take the first step to an efficient expense management system by booking a demo today!