4 Best Practices to Effectively Handle Your Expense Management Processes
Businesses must effectively create Travel & Expense (T&E) policy to manage their expenses effectively. Creating a T&E policy for the company is not an easy task, as it requires more research work. While creating the policy, you have to consider various aspects, including the company’s budget, employees’ expectations and comfort, and safety during the trip. It is also equally important to look outside your company and analyze what practices your competitors are implementing to effectively manage their employees’ travel expenses. With proper research, you can refine and enhance your expense management program.
In this article, we have discussed a few most effective practices that help to properly manage your expense management process.
How to Manage Your Expense Management Process
Pre-Approvals
Collating the employees’ expense reports and verifying them against T&E policy terms is tedious. Employers have to spend their valuable time identifying and eliminating the expenses that are not covered under the policy. On the other hand, delayed reimbursements or rejections in the claims can affect the employees’ productivity. You can cope with these two issues by adopting expensive software that allows you to configure pre-approvals for employees’ travel expenses.
Centralize the Travel Expense Process
Businesses have to track the expense reports submitted by the employees and verify each expense against the expense receipts while reimbursing employees’ costs. This process requires the finance teams to spend their valuable time that can be used for productive tasks that can add value to the organization. Plus, the process of tracking and validating the expenses requires a considerable amount of manual intervention, which can add up to a significant workforce spread across various branches of organizations located in different regions.
This process lacks proper transparency and consistency in the process and also costs a lot of money. Prior to implementing an expense solution, most businesses faced a lot of issues due to manual processes. With an expensive software solution, companies can automate most of the manual processes and reduce the need for human intervention.
Initiate a Corporate Card Program
If your strategy of employees making purchases with corporate credit cards backfire with reckless spending and more liabilities, then you should possibly reconsider your decision. Today, many corporate credit card programs offer plentiful and highly competitive programs that provide numerous financial and operational benefits. We have listed a few benefits a good corporate credit card program can offer:
Most employees are concerned about the charges they incur for purchases made with corporate cards and the delay in the process of submitting expense reports associated with those charges. The finance teams should interact with the employees regularly to motivate them to properly use the corporate cards and promptly submit expense reports and reimbursement claims.
Automate Policy Enforcement
The company’s travel and expense policies are difficult to understand and remember as well. However, automating expense policy enforcement helps you eliminate the tedious tasks involved in tracking and verifying the expense reports submitted by employees against policy terms. This streamlines the processes and allows the approvers to process reimbursements to the employees quickly while also eliminating the payments to the out-of-policy expenses.
The Conclusion
Employees often participate in business travels to meet clients in person and promote the company’s products or services. While traveling, employees may sometimes spend their money to meet their expenses during the journey. Businesses should reimburse these expenses as quickly as possible to enhance employees’ experience.
