Auditors from startup auditing companies may travel 80% of the time to visit their clients or conduct audits in the field. This means that employers will significantly incur more expense reimbursements as they use public transportation, hotels, flights, meals, and other expenses. In many startup auditing companies, the employees who travel the most are most susceptible to getting their expenses flagged.
In contrast, employees in the IT industry tend to stay in the office the majority of the time and they travel less, so, unsurprisingly, only 6% of their expenses are flagged as per AppZen.
Startup auditing companies are struggling to detect the potential misconduct
Lawyers and support staff have frequent business trips, long working hours, most time away from home, added work stress, and make the employees feel entitled to fancy dinners or flight upgrades from the company dime. Also with layers of policies, rules, client billing, and travel rules, there is simply more opportunity for expense report misconduct or errors.
Why it is smarter for a startup auditing company to invest in a solution
The major takeaway from this data is that not employees in certain industries commit more fraud, it’s that existing expense policies need to be amended. With an AI-powered solution, finance managers can get a better understanding of T&E to send who proactively identifies who violates the policies, or who has an impactful expense culture across their organization.
Here are the top 5 reasons why startup auditing companies must have an expense management system
1. Handling and verifying bill receipts of your employees
With an expense management system, handling and verifying bill receipts becomes easier for your employees. It is ideal for auditing companies to have complete control over a company’s expenditures like setting up automatic rules, warnings, and spending limits from the company’s budget.
If a violation is detected, both the managers and employees will be notified, followed by the reason for the policy violation. Therefore, it is also easier to apply for the best T&E policies when the options are synced with the system.
The finance team will be the happiest about adapting to the expense tracking software because they can identify red-flag reports that violate the company’s T&E policy. Approvers can view the violated reports and are flexible on whether to accept or reject the report.
2.Tracking the employees who are 80% away for auditing purposes
Since auditors in startup auditing companies travel almost 80% of their work time, it is harder for the company to track the employees. But in return, employees see a lot of benefits in their career ranging from giving the ability to create networks for the company, products, and services offered, business processes, etc. The auditors will have internal, external, IRS tax, financial, operational, compliance, information system, and payroll.
With a system, you can get real-time actionable insights into the business travel expenses that can be used for better budgeting and forecasting. The data will be completely synced and available for the managers department-wise or individually to keep track of the individual or group spending. It can identify the top spenders, company policy violators, duplicate expenses, and weekend/holiday expenses. With this actionable data, the auditing company can take insights on what internal action to be taken to improve the process.
3. Reduced manual efforts
In the legacy system, after an employee makes an expense, they need to collect bills and receipts, submit the form for the collected expenses, wait for the expenses to get approved or rejected, send them back for correction if required, and get the expense reimbursement.
With an intelligent expense management system, an employee can log an expense, submit expense details from the app, get it approved or rejected, get it reimbursed, and if the expense is rejected, an employee will have the option to justify it.
However, every data is recorded for both the employee and manager tracking resulting in fewer follow-ups and verification processes. The manual effort of an employee to get the reimbursement is reduced to a few clicks.
4. Fewer Errors and Delays in Reimbursement
With 1000+ bills and expenses to manage, now employers can manage it faster under the compliance of their submitted cash advances. Also, they can clearly support and manage multi-currency and multi-project. With manual reports, both the finance team and the employees may be susceptible to human data-entry errors that will further get compounded when the finance team transcribes them into spreadsheets. This is completely solved with good expense management software.
Also with automated workflows, employees no longer have to constantly remind their manager and finance department to approve the expense reports. This will result in a faster expense reimbursement process and eliminate process-related delays. The automation features in the expense management system will also send automatic alerts and notifications if the payments are overdue.
5.Get accurate forecasting on what, how, and why your expenses are out of control
You can get yearly, quarterly, and monthly reports of the company’s expenses. This will give both group and individual spending behavior. The reports will show where the employees exceeded their expenses on their individual type of expense reports such as upper limits of hotels, flights, food, and public transportation.
It gives insights to the auditing company on where they can pre-book certain events or coupons in bulk beforehand. This will result in less spending on coupons or bulk bookings if more than one employee is traveling together for the particular event. On the safer hand, auditing companies can see what went wrong when things go out of control.
Conclusion
The manual work of keeping track of all your employees in your startup auditing company is a big thing for business travelers and finance teams. There are hours spent on expense calculation, approval, dealing with policy violations, and report submission for maintenance.
With ExpenseOut, you can streamline expense reimbursements from end to end as it incorporates the key features you will need for the system. You can start using ExpenseOut for Free today. Check out our pricing for more details.
