Is your expense management system ready?

The world of business travel is changing at an ever-accelerating pace. Disruption has quickly become the norm with sharing economy services like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb recently gaining significant ground among corporate travelers. Mobile device usage has exploded, taking the smartphone from what was a nice-to-have just a short while ago to an essential business platform for everything from communications to payments to apps for every service imaginable.

With all these advancements and innovations in technology, it’s high time companies take a hard look at their expense management practices to ensure their systems are keeping pace. Based on the changing dynamics in the business travel marketplace, here are five expense reporting features that can help your company meet the demands facing today’s accounting professionals and travelling employees alike.

Mobile Reporting Smartphones are the perfect companion for business travelers, and usage in the U.S. has reached a point of near saturation. Its ubiquity and utility also make smartphones the ideal platform for expense reporting. Starting with smartphone-enabled receipt image capture that allows travelers to take and save digital photos of their expense receipts, to mobile report creation and manager review and approval, nothing simplifies the expense reporting process for employees like a mobile app.

Automation Automation is at the core of many of Certify’s expense reporting features. Fundamentally, automation streamlines workflow for employees and managers, and it also simplifies backend processes for accountants and administrators. This includes automatically linking receipts with expense line items, direct credit card data feeds, and integration with ERP and HRIS systems to reduce manual data entry. Unique to our solution, Certify ReportExecutive™ also automates the expense report creation process by allowing administrators to preschedule expense report build and submit dates for the entire company.

Compliance Tools Technology has expanded greatly the vendor and service options available to business travelers, making company T&E policy increasingly important as a tactic to control costs. Cloud-based expense management software like Certify offers a number of tools to help make travel policy compliance easy. These include features that automatically flag employee violations and notify managers of out-of-policy expenses, automatic review for duplicate expenses and receipts, expense category spending limits, mobile compliance tools, and more.

Integrated Travel Travel booking options today are limitless, but company accountants only want one thing; that is, the best rate for any given itinerary. Two features of an integrated travel and expense management platform—lowest logical fare and pre-trip approval—make this possible. First, lowest logical fare works by automatically limiting traveler choices to only the best available air or hotel rates. Next, as the name suggests, pre-trip approval requires manager authorization before an employee books any travel arrangements. Both features can be configured to meet various policy guidelines, and as an integrated platform, travel expenses are automatically captured in the system to further streamline process.

Reporting and Analytics It’s been said that you can’t control what you can’t see, and the same goes for company T&E expense spending. That’s why Certify offers a comprehensive suite of reporting tools to provide complete visibility into workflow and spending. Data that’s inaccessible or might require hours of number crunching in a manual expense process can be called up in seconds with Certify. And reports aren’t just limited to administrators or financial data. Employees, managers and senior executives can access an entirely new level of transparency and accountability with ease.

One more way cloud-based expense reporting can prepare your company for a brighter future: it will save you money. How much? Find out now with our online expense report calculator, it’s free to use and available anytime.

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The Right Time To Use Expense Reports in your Firm

Expense report is actually a piece of content with the info on expenditures sustained on the personal or formal visit of a person or even a group of persons. An expense report is generally used in official functions and presented by the staff to the manager to claim for repayment of charges incurred on travel that is covered by the business. However, expense reports are likewise used at times in personalized record keeping. It might be an individual practice of someone to retain record of all their travel expenditures; it could definitely help in domestic budget preparation and taxes administration matters.

Expense report frequently addresses items like commutation expenses (for instance air fare, train ticket, gas cost in case of personal vehicle), accommodation, dining costs and miscellaneous expenses related to travel. Although, it is in employee's own advantage to send the expense report as soon as possible to have earlier payments, it is normal for several reports to be late. This is exactly why most of the firms are switching to expense report software.

These kinds of expense report software demands the staff to send in the expense report on the internet to the employer as well as management and deliver the receipts by way of fax. That is a consistent process and so the blunders connected with manual entries are certainly not feasible and appropriate submitting of expense report also brings about quick reimbursement. This is much better for the business along with its staff and expense management gets to be better and much easier and the workers are gratified as well on account of obtaining hassle-free reimbursements.

Expense management software also causes it to become hassle-free for the workers to send in their expense reports. They can do so while relaxing in their residence over the internet. The business even offers multiple advantages of such expense management systems. They could use these expense reports not just to reimburse employee's expenses but also for expense management and minimization.

Diverse business reviews from all throughout the United States reveal that at the moment the travel expenses would be the second highest source of spending for companies and businesses in the USA. It only rates second to the pays of the employees. It indicates that there is a whole lot of spending in this region and therefore valuable expense management can conserve big money towards the business owners. Expense report software enables us to do that if we understand how to employ them properly.

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Best Benefits of Expense Reporting Software Can Give In

If you are a business owner, then you are surely spending money to manage your business. The primary concern for most small to mid-sized companies is to control expenses on travel and entertainment that’s also a big cost area. This is why most companies look to control and cut your firm expenses.

Most small and mid-sized businesses use paper or spreadsheets to report on daily, weekly or monthly expenses. Most of the times, you don’t get a complete picture of the expenses with the conventional processes and procedures. The paper based processes or procedures will give you little or no ability to actively control and manage expenses.

There are some very good expense reporting software available in the market that will open the window into all travel and entertainment spending. Such software will also provide in-depth visibility over company-wide expense report. Expense tracking software is managed electronically, so there is no loss of time and effort. Without a central tracking system it is very difficult to enforce expense policies and get the best visibility into project related and reimbursable expenses.

Expense tracking relies heavily on manual entry and receipt collection, which makes collecting expense data from employees very cumbersome. Also, such processes are time consuming and error prone the consequences an administrative nightmare. Without accurate expense data, managers cannot be sure if the policies are being enforced or if the reimbursements are happening on time. This can also lead to employee dissatisfaction and in turn, it can result in a high employee turnover rate.

To make things very simple, there are many cloud based expense tracking systems that have gained a lot of popularity these days. These cloud-based expense tracking applications provide managers and decision makers with real time visibility into reimbursable and project related expenses. Using the cloud-based expense tracking platforms, employees don’t have to be physically present in the office to submit their expense data. The online submission of the expense data is convenient and easy. So, employees don’t have to lose on time and effort.

Managers can monitor their team’s spending in real time and ensure that all policies are being met. If you are a business owner looking out for the best expense software, make sure that you select the best one that fits into your existing infrastructure and processes. In other words, the expense tracking application that you will be buying needs to be compatible with any project management or financial systems.

If you are using the cloud based expense software, you don’t need to be worried about security, upgrades, maintenance or infrastructure. Why? Well, that’s because the cloud service provider will be doing all that for you which will definitely cost you a nominal amount. You can research the internet and get several names for the cloud-based expense tracking tool, but it is important that you choose the one that will provide you the best customized solutions. You can get a free trial from any popular cloud computing service provider and ensure that you have seen all the facets of the tool before you take the final call.

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