Dealing with the expense reimbursement process of a business can quite often be a time-consuming and difficult task. The valuable time of managers, often senior managers at that, can be consumed in the checking, verifying, and authorizing of expense claims for their teams.
Let’s take a look at the main reasons why manual expense processes are causing your organization efficiency problems.
1. Your expense authorization hierarchy is over-complicated
In an attempt to ensure adherence to the company’s expense policy, it’s often the case that the process is set, so an expense claim has to pass through multiple hands before reaching final authorization and payment. While it’s crucial that genuine errors or potential fraud are caught early during the authorization process, it’s misguided to think that the more managers who see claims, the better, or that senior managers need to be involved in the authorization of minor expenses.
2. Your expense policies are too complex, inaccessible, or even non-existent
Dealing with business expenses can be a confusing business. Without a clear and coherent set of guidelines, employees can easily be unsure about what is an allowable expense and what isn’t, unwittingly breaking policies with the best intentions. What’s more, managers will struggle to correctly and consistently authorize claims if they are unable to draw upon a straightforward and user-friendly expense policy. This issue can lead to expenses being put through the system that are not allowable, potentially resulting in greater costs to the business.
3. Your manual expense processes consume valuable time
Too many businesses are still using spreadsheets and emails to submit and authorize expense claims. There are numerous reasons why this can cause serious issues for your organizational efficiency. First, dealing with the administration that comes hand-in-hand with manual processes costs your business time and precious man hours that would be better spent in more value-adding activities.
Second, there are many more opportunities to make errors or lose information when relying on employees to personally input figures, tally up amounts, and provide hard copy receipts. Finally, from a compliance perspective, it is so much trickier to keep track of policy adherence, expense claim values, and inaccuracies when working with manual processes.
4. Employees’ expense reimbursements are frequently delayed
The final result of all of this inefficiency is often delayed expense reimbursement. Perhaps the authorizer is waiting on a hard copy receipt before they can approve the claim, or a manager’s absence from work means there is a hold up in approval. There could also be a bottleneck of claims requiring approval.
Not only can this cause inevitable frustration on the part of employees, but it also adds a layer of additional queries and complaints that have to be dealt with by the finance team or expense approvers, such as checking the progress of the claim, responding to the individual, etc.
5. You have poor visibility of your expense procedures
Using manual methods to manage your expense processes means that you are missing a vital opportunity to analyze trends in expense claims, compare historical and current data, and pick up on uncharacteristic or potentially suspicious expenditure quickly.
How to streamline your expense procedures using Kissflow
So, you’ve identified with some or all of the issues mentioned above and have come to the conclusion that your organization’s expense process is influencing its productivity and efficiency. There’s a straightforward solution–adding automation to the process. Kissflow’s user-friendly and intuitive company expense app uses the latest software to automate the key steps in your expense approval workflow, replacing outdated and slow manual process with streamlined, automatic ones.
You can set up personalized workflows within the system so expense claims are directed straight to the relevant authorizer. This will minimize the delays that result from misguided claims. In addition, it’s easy to set up monetary authorization limits and budget codes so claims can flow through the system with minimal queries or issues, requiring significantly less manual intervention and speeding up processing and payment times. What’s more,
Kissflow’s sophisticated reporting functionalities offer users a wealth of insights into the company’s expense activities, allowing you to track, monitor, and analyze the extent to which your expense procedures are working for the business.
It’s time to add automation to your expense process
Processing and authorizing employee expense claims can all too often be an excessively administrative, financial, and manpower strain on a business, requiring manual workarounds, overly complicated processes, inefficient tracking, and delayed payments. Adding automation can help your business simplify and streamline the workflows involved in the process, guaranteeing improved efficiency, time and cost savings, and an expense procedure that is designed to suit the needs of your business perfectly.
