Solve the Top Challenges of Expense Reporting
Expense reporting is a vital process to ensure that you’re maximizing revenue and accurately tracking expenses on every project. It’s also a process that employees tend to dread—which means there’s a real opportunity to make improvements that will benefit your organization for years to come.
Challenges of clunky processes
Many businesses and nonprofits rely on outdated, inefficient, and overly complicated expense reporting processes, which leads to frustration for employees. These are among the signs that your process is behind the times:
- Your travel and expense policy is complicated, requires a lot of employee time, and has resulted in multiple errors and inaccurate reports over the years.
- Employees express confusion about expense reporting, asking a lot of questions that, over the course of the year, take hours of time to answer.
- Reimbursements take a long time and are not provided on a regular schedule that employees can rely on.
- Employees can’t submit expense information using their smartphones or other mobile devices.
Tips to improve expense reporting
If your expense reporting processes are out of date, the good news is that you can make significant improvements with a relatively small investment of resources. To begin with, audit your overall process to evaluate its accuracy, timeliness, and efficiency. Find out how many hours employees are spending on the processes—the answer might surprise you.
As part of your audit, be sure to talk you’re your employees about what they like and don’t like about current policies and practices. By involving them in the review process, you can get more buy-in on the changes you eventually make.
If you find real problems with your current processes, consider investing in automated expense reporting software. For instance, if you use Sage Intacct, a cloud-based accounting software solution, you can easily integrate third-party add-ons like Expensify, which provides real-time expense reporting—you set the policy, and Expensify automates the process, including syncing all data to provide next-day ACH reimbursement.
By taking a close look at your current processes and then streamlining them with new software or other solutions, you can maximize revenue and make sure your employees stay focused on business goals instead of spending hours on expenses, accounting, and reporting.
Make the right decision for your organization
Insero & Co. is a public accounting firm with decades of experience working with both nonprofits and businesses. Our experts are available to help you streamline your processes, including providing audit assistance and business consulting.
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About the Author: Kimberly Gangi
