What is Expense Report Automation?

Does hearing about expense reports make you smile?

Well, you might be alone on this. 

Managing and understanding expenses is complicated as it’s, now if you add to that the task of creating a report, people start running away from it. 

Jokes aside, at some point, every business sees itself dealing with expense reports. If one of your collaborators purchases with their own money, you have to pay it back; There’s no other way around. 

That’s bad news

The good news is that you can make it less of a suffering. 

How? 

Expense report automation 

What are Expense Reports?

In an ideal world, you’ll have a completely digital system for internal purchases, working with p-cards or similars and making everyone happy. We don’t live in an ideal world, hence things like expense reports are still needed. 

Expense reports are not necessarily bad, the problem here is that employees have to manually create a document that could be as large as the amount of receipts and bills they have to attach. 

Situations where Expense Reports are Necessary 

Even if you have a digital method for your employees to make purchases, there might be situations where they have to pay with their own money.

• If it’s a new employee and they don’t have access yet to virtual cards 
• If the corporate card is forgotten or lost 
• The vendor doesn’t accept cards and wants only cash 
• Problems with  the cards itself 

What’s it’s Expense Report Automation?

It couldn’t be more simple 

Expense report automation is just the act of using technology to make the creation of expense reports an easy task. Instead of spending hours writing everything down on paper or on a tedious spreadsheet, your team uses digital solutions, usually a mobile app to record the expenses and send them for approval. 

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How Expense Report Automation Works?

Let’s say that you are the person purchasing with your own money and now you are wondering about how can you send the receipt to your manager or person in charge. 

Take a picture 

Remember that we said that most expense report automation systems worked on mobile phones? The camera is the reason. 

With a good system, you can use a mobile app to scan your receipts instantly. The app employs optical character recognition (OCR) to extract important data, like amounts and dates, directly from the receipts.

Data is recorded 

We don’t need to say again how dreadful is to fill out a report by yourself, by using the app you scan a receipt, and the information is automatically entered into your expense report. No more spreadsheets…at least not for this. 

Approval workflow

Automated systems are always a great choice when it comes to the approval process. In this case, it can directly send your expense reports to the right managers or finance people. Notifications alert them when their action is needed, speeding up the entire process.

Reimbursement

The time when this happens will depend on the company’s policies but it’s common to wait until the end of the month to process the payment. 

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Benefits of Automated Expense Reporting

It saves time 

Nothing fancy here, just a simple truth, nobody enjoys spending hours on something that could be done in minutes, with automated systems, you can quickly submit your expenses using a mobile app, and finance teams can approve reports without any problems for you or for them. 

Reduces errors

When we don’t like to perform a task, we are more prone to make mistakes, so it’s not surprising that 19% of expense reports come with errors.  Features like receipt scanning and integration with accounting software ensure that all expenses are recorded accurately, minimizing the chances of manual mistakes. 

Happy employees 

No company will benefit from frustrated staff members, so why not stick with an option that makes everyone happier? Automation can reduce frustration by simplifying submissions and providing quick feedback on approvals.

Visibility into spending 

Another important benefit of working with a digital system? It has tracking features included, so if you want to know more about the spending habits of your team, choose to automate expense reports. You’ll be able to see who submitted what, when it was approved, and how much was spent.

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How to Implement Expense Report Automation

Search your options 

Yes, expense report automation is going to be positive for your business, but that doesn’t mean however that you have to choose blindly, focus on options that include features such as mobile receipt capture, real-time expense tracking, and analytics dashboards to help you monitor spending.

Get feedback 

Automating expense reports is good for you as a business owner, but ultimately, it’s going to be your team the ones who will be directly using the system, so consider listening to their opinion on what features they’d find most helpful and ensure the tool you choose meets their needs.

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