Delayed reimbursement from companies is one of the most significant causes of frustration for business travellers.
While the delays are not intentional, management, finance teams, and HR professionals must look at what’s causing the reimbursements to be processed days or weeks after an employee has submitted a receipt or an expense report.
Now, how can speedier reimbursements be achieved?
To know that we first need to delve into what causes the delays in the first place.
What causes delays in expense reimbursement?
Turns out, legacy means of expense management are to blame.
Typically, employees must fill out lengthy spreadsheets, maintain all their paper receipts, send detailed emails, or spend hours putting together an expense report before they can file a reimbursement claim.
Following this tedious process, the expense report goes through two or three rounds of verification by the finance team and the management before the final go-ahead is given for releasing the reimbursement to the employee.
To make matters worse, companies can have confusing or vague travel and expense (T&E) policies that make it even harder for employees to send in accurate expense reports.
Because expense fraud is on the rise, reimbursements are delayed even more due to the additional checks required to weed out fraudulent receipts or previously claimed expenses.
Automation—the surefire way to faster reimbursements
With an automated expense management solution, like ExpenseOut, the days of employees waiting for several days or even weeks for their reimbursement claims to be approved are long behind us.
Given its groundbreaking AI capabilities, OCR functionality, real-time policy checking, mobile-friendly design, and multi-level approval feature, employees can get their reimbursements in seconds.
Here’s how ExpenseOut makes expense management seamless at every touchpoint.
At the employee level
Gone are the days of filling out spreadsheets and carrying around crummy receipts. With ExpenseOut at their disposal, employees can snap a picture of their receipt, have it stored in the digital vault, or send it instantly to the finance team or management for approval.
All of this can be done on the go!
The OCR functionality allows the software to capture all the essential details and send a detailed report to the management, finance team, or HR professional.
Notably, when there is a policy violation, the employee is notified before the submission occurs. The employee can either remove/ replace the expense item or leave an explanation. This feature will come in handy, especially when premium clients are involved, and the employee must buy dinner at a fancy restaurant or book flights at the last minute to meet with them.
At the finance team level
The finance team is instantly notified when an employee submits the expense report. It is worth mentioning that the software automatically cross-references the receipts with previous submissions to ensure duplicate expenses are not reimbursed.
Also, suppose there is any policy violation. It shows up on the finance team’s dashboard, which allows them to seek clarification or reject the reimbursement claim without any direct interaction with the employee.
However, if the expense is legit, the finance team can initiate the reimbursement in seconds.
The finance team can quickly credit the reimbursements to the employee’s salary account due to ExpenseOut’s ability to integrate with Human Resource Management Software and accounting tools.
At the management level
With the click of a button, the management can approve or reject reimbursement claims.
ExpenseOut also allows the management to pre-approve expenses. Instead of exchanging emails or filling out forms, the employee can quickly raise a request, mentioning the reason for the expense. The management can weigh the merits of the expense based on the company’s T&E policy, which is a process automated by ExpenseOut.
Expense requests with red flags are immediately identified by the software’s AI and brought to the management’s attention in real-time so that they can make decisions optimally.
Given this streamlining of the approval process, the management can clear reimbursement requests in seconds and focus on more important work.
Conclusion
Irrespective of your company size, ExpenseOut’s automaton capabilities will speed up your expense reimbursement process and bring down the time taken to process claims to mere seconds.
With ExpenseOut at your disposal, you can focus on more important tasks while being confident that not a single fraudulent claim has been reimbursed and that your employees are thoroughly satisfied with their business travel regime.
Take your reimbursement process to the next level with ExpenseOut. Try it for free now!
