Expense Reports: love it or leave it, but one cant ignore it. Companies across India have stuck to these forms of reimbursements – combination of handwritten or spreadsheet-based expense reports & attaching physical paper receipts as supporting documents.
We have 6 reasons to tell why you should move on from a pen and paper based expense management processes in your organisation.
Time, a plenty. Not.
No matter how well we manage our time, we always feel there is need for that wee bit more. Back in school & college it was for completing your exam papers. Time, or the lack of enough of it is something that has remained with us throughout our lives.
Sales teams have enough and more work like finding ways to new leads and getting new customers. Expecting them to invest more time into preparing manual expense forms to submit for claims is not fair. If not done during work hours, most of them would have to part with their personal time with friends and family to make up for the time required to do these tasks. And this is something everyone having to submit expense reports go through.
A lot of valuable time is lost by the company as well as their employees.Magical receipts.
The paper receipts are usually collected and kept for a few days in your wallet. An organised person may manage to put it all neatly in an envelop or on the desk top.
Many a times, one carries out the weekly/monthly ritual of clearing out unwanted paper/business cards, etc from you wallet, or their desk. And very often one accidentally throws away a paper receipt or two that was needed for an expense claim along with all the other personal grocery and/or shopping receipts.
As luck may have it, the content in the important receipts fade away over time. This magical disappearance of either the content or the receipt completely is something we all would have faced at least once.The more you delay in filing an expense report, the less chances of the receipts being available or suitable for reimbursement during the claim process.
Got reimbursed. But, but you had spent more.
Many a times since there is a delay in recording expenses, a few receipts are lost and so one has to do with just submitting those that they found. Due to the processes involved, at times one would also not take the pain of submitting an expense report. But these small unclaimed spends adds up over time.
End of the week, month or year, when you look back, you realise that a lot of such spends happened where you were entitled to reimbursement, but due to lack of supporting documentation, it never came through. And you wonder where did all that money go.
Most of the time you end up receiving lesser than the spends you had made that was to be reimbursed.
The long wait for reimbursements.
Like many key moments in our lives like delivery of a new car/bike, the reimbursement process seems to be taking more time that it normally should. The current day processes involve the report going through different levels for approvals and finally getting reimbursed by the finance team.
If a manager has many such claims to approve, it could take forever to complete the process. The Finance team could take much longer to complete their tasks as they have more reports piled on their desks than others and it requires verification, documentation and settlement.
With automation, we could bring down the time spent on such mundane tasks to ensure it could be used elsewhere, more productively.
Finance team have mundane repetitive tasks.
It is a pain for one to do the pen-and-paper based expense reports. But spare a thought for the finance team who has to handle all your reports plus each and every report of each and every employee in an organisation.
Apart from going through reports and recording all the credit and debit data, they also have to enter the data from paper reports submitted by all employees into their accounting software. And this manual job takes away a lot of valuable time from them doing more challenging, and important tasks.
Repetitive and rule-based tasks like this should be automated to improve productivity of the team.
And finally, a lot of wasted paper.
The amount of paper wasted as vouchers and printed expense reports cannot be ignored. Everyday, someone in an organisation is filling a form that is beneficial only until he/she gets reimbursed. The paper is dumped in the bin once the data is recorded in the accounting softwares. Now think of the millions of expense reports that still happens on pen-and-paper form.
In this day and age, when bigger documents are moving digital with e-signatures, such wasteful forms must be made available in digital formats.
This New Year, take an oath to not waste any more paper on expense claims
These are all strong enough reasons why one must move to an easy-to-use, online expense management, and one that can auto-generate expense reports with minimal manual inputs from the employee.
We all need a companion that prepares an expense report on your behalf.
We have just that: A Card that writes your Expense Report.
Trust us when we say that you would love the Paysack Expense Management Solution. Let us help you transform the way financial services are handled in your workplace.
Talk to us now!