Most companies these days adopt work models. They work with both in-office and remote workers. In addition, they drive customer acquisition, market expansion, and customer relationship building by making employees engage in domestic and international business travel.
Remote workers and work travelers incur various expenses to carry out business activities. They expect employers to reimburse the business-related expenses without any hassle or delay. Also, they often experience stress and feel unmotivated when the finance team needs more time to process expense claims.
Your organization can make the employee expense reimbursement process efficient and transparent by focusing on two important aspects. Firstly, it must help employees submit expense reports accurately and effortlessly. Secondly, it must make it easier for the finance team to reduce the time required to track, reimburse, and pay employee-initiated expenses.
Your organization must help employees avoid and claim non-reimbursable expenses by sharing a comprehensive expense list. Also, you must divide expenses into relevant categories by making a specific travel expenses list and a remote employee expense list. At the same time, you streamline employee expense reimbursement by following these best practices.
7 Best Practices to Streamline Your Employee Expense Reimbursement Process
Share Comprehensive Expense Lists
Your organizational expense policy must clearly define what expenses an employee can claim and what expenses will not be reimbursed. Hence, you must make and share comprehensive expense lists for remote workers and work travelers.
The clarity will help employees claim only in-policy expenses and avoid out-of-policy expenses. For instance, work travelers can refer to the travel expenses list to book the right flights, hotels, and other travel products.
However, you must focus on communicating the expense policies to each employee. Also, you need to ensure that each employee can access the relevant expense list on the go using his smartphone or tablet.
Outline the Expense Reimbursement Process
Employees often submit expense reports at the last minute. Many employees further submit expense reports without relevant details and receipts. You can boost the efficiency of the employee expense reimbursement process by defining the rules for when and how to submit expense reports.
It becomes easier for the finance team to speed up reimbursements when employees submit expense reports early with relevant details. However, your policy must make the finance team reimburse employee-initiated expenses in a specific timeline.
Automate Expense Report Generation
You cannot speed up employee expense reimbursements when employees submit paper-based expense reports. Hence, your strategy must make them submit digital expense reports and scanned invoices. At the same time, you must eliminate data-entry errors and prevent policy violations by automating the expense report generation process.
Your organization should implement expense management software that produces automated expense reports by capturing information from scanned receipts and invoices. The software will help employees reduce the time required to claim expenses. Also, the finance team can speed up reimbursements by reviewing digital expense reports quickly.
Facilitate Real-Time Expense Tracking
Real-time expense tracking is essential to make the employee expense reimbursement process transparent. It becomes easier for your finance team to identify unprocessed expense claims when they track employee expenses in real time.
Also, they can facilitate informed financial decision-making by sharing accurate and reliable data. You can facilitate real-time expense tracking by implementing expense management software that features an intuitive dashboard.
The dashboard will help your team get real-time spending visibility by knowing the current status of expenses incurred by various employees. In addition, you can use the dashboard to make sense of the expense data by generating reports using relevant metrics and parameters.
Support ACH Payments
While incurring business-related expenses, employees use various payment methods. However, they expect employers to transfer funds directly to their bank accounts while reimbursing expenses. You can boost employee experiences by making your finance team use automated clearing house (ACH) transfers.
As a bank-to-bank transfer mechanism, ACH debits funds from your business account and credits the money directly to the employee’s bank account. Hence, employees will receive payments quickly after the finance team approves their expense claims.
Conduct Expense Audits Regularly
Remote workers often violate preset policies by claiming personal expenses as business-related expenses. Likewise, work travelers execute expense fraud by inflating expense amounts, submitting fictitious bills, and claiming personal expenses.
Hence, you cannot streamline the employee expense management process without preventing policy violations and eliminating expense fraud. It becomes easier for your company to detect expense fraud and policy violations when you make expense audit an ongoing activity.
You can speed up expense audits by implementing software that creates automated audit trails. Your team can use the software to verify expenses by accessing relevant receipts and reading the comments made by approvers while reviewing expense claims.
Leverage Data Analytics
Business travel trends change at frequent intervals. You must keep work travelers motivated by adopting new trends regularly. Hence, you have to review and update the travel expenses list from time to time. Likewise, you can refine expense policies based on the patterns and trends in employee expense data.
Data analytics solutions gain actionable insights by analyzing employee expense data regularly without human interventions. You must leverage the data-driven insights shared by the software to boost the employee expense reimbursement process.
For instance, you can use these insights to detect issues increasing expense reimbursement time and unproductive expenses incurred by employees. In addition, the insights make it easier for you to curtail costs by refining expense policies and updating expense lists based on real-time data.
Conclusion
Your organization cannot keep remote workers and work travelers motivated without simplifying and accelerating the employee expense reimbursement process. You should help the finance team manage expense claims submitted by employees accurately without taking more time.
At the same time, you must share the remote employee expense list and travel expenses list to ensure that employees do not claim out-of-policy expenses. However, you can make the process efficient and transparent only by making it easier for the finance team to track, reimburse, and audit employee-initiated expenses.