Gone are the days when we had to perform many mundane tasks and be inefficient in process management. Today, technology is making processes easier and simpler, allowing employees to spend more time on important tasks. Without a doubt, all business processes will benefit from automation; however, automation can help make business processes more efficient. Automation can greatly benefit business processes that involve administrative tasks. One such business process that involves a lot of administrative activities is expense reporting. From travel booking to report processing, there are many phases where automation can work and save time for everyone involved. Not only would this make the process efficient, but it would also add value to the organization and improve the bottom line.

Let’s take a look at some reasons why automation can help and why it’s necessary for the process to be efficient.

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Time is of the essence in every task we perform in business. Automation would not only save many man-hours, but also reduce the time it takes to process reimbursement requests. Now let’s see why expense reports take longer. First, the employee must spend more time completing the expense report, keeping all receipts, and submitting the reports to the approver. The approvers will have to verify and validate all the reports that arrive and then approve after a successful validation. Verification should not be rushed, all details should be error-proofed, and validation should be performed to uncover illegitimate spending and misreporting. To do so in less time, organizations must commit to the verification process, which could result in expense fraud. What if you could complete verification in less time? This is what you can do with automation. Expense management software will automate the validation process by flagging suspicious expense claims and sending them to the submitter for correction. Not only will this save time processing expense reports, but it will also reduce several steps in the expense management process.

Travel and expense policy

Organizations have detailed travel and expense policies, but do not always ensure that these policies are followed in real time. Enforcing T&E policy is tedious and sometimes organizations need to allocate some resources to make sure everything is within policy. This is where automation comes in. The automated expense reporting system will help you automate T&E policy enforcement and ensure that employees cannot submit out-of-policy expense claims.

The software restricts the entries in the expense report. For example, your T&E policy will say that you are only allowed to book a particular category of hotel chains, but what happens when your employee books a hotel that isn’t on the list? When you do this in a spreadsheet, it will be difficult to track and ensure that employees are not submitting expenses for approved vendors. In contrast to the traditional process, the automated expense solution will prevent employees from submitting any data that is not in the T&E policy.

This will ensure that outside policy reporting does not occur. This is just one instance and the same can happen with any other aspect of expense management. The software will not allow any exceptions and if there are, the system will draw the supervisor’s attention. Therefore, everything will be done well and in a timely manner.

Reports and analysis

Real-time reporting is one of the main reasons for automation. By automating the process, you can have the opportunity to fully analyze the entire process and gain insights that can help guide the decision-making process. Taking a data-driven approach to decision making will give you visibility and transparency into the system, a desirable way to control fraud and misinformation occurring in your organization. Analytics can help organizations plan and forecast better. Quotes can now be more practical as you can understand where the gaps are in the process. Suppose the finance department wants to know if the reports or any other information is being processed, the analytics will give you all the details in just a few clicks.

Expense reporting automation can help businesses in many ways. The software solution will transform the way expenses are reported and reimbursed, eliminating the worst things like misreporting, fraud and delayed reimbursements.

Another important benefit that the software offers is reminders and alerts. There can be a lot of miscommunication when employees take a manual approach, but the software solution triggers continuous notifications and alerts to all stakeholders to ensure there are no communication gaps and the process runs smoothly.