Business travel is all about making a corporate presence, creating customer relationships, and developing supplier rapport. Even in this fast-paced, tech world, business owners spend around seven percent of their annual budget in entertainment and travel expenses. With such good deal money in play, companies are looking forward to capitalizing on the benefits brought by robust software solutions.
The key challenge faced by businesses is streamlining various processes by reducing the overhead charges as they expand. All they require is an automated expense system efficient enough to process every information simultaneously without crashing. A strong expense management system provides this solution diligently, which is why several companies are leaving their spreadsheets for a better and automated system. If you are on the same road of dealing with excessive manual processing, you can ask your procurement agent to switch to an expense automated solution for fast and accurate results.
Below given are some of the reasons why you should switch to an automated solution:
- Submitting every document manually, processing, and reimbursing every expense report has been calculated to cost extra money and a lot of physical effort. The requirement of entering every detail manually, mailing them, verifying them, and approving their entry onto a corporate ledger asks for high labor and is indeed a time-consuming process. Additionally, paperwork that needs to be filed manually and then shipped accordingly slows down the reimbursement times. Switching to an automated expense system where everything is done at the expense of a machine is a much more paced-up process that effectively reduces administrative costs. You can even ask your procurement agent to switch to an automated system when sourcing products from overseas.
- A key area served by the automated solution is that you can submit the expenses even when traveling on the road. In other words, you will no longer require keeping every receipt until your return to the office to submit the expenses. Instead, you can click a picture of the receipt or receipts and directly send them to the system with an automated system. The optical character recognition (OCR) is a specification of a computerized system. With the help of an OCR, the receipt can be automatically read, and the transaction data can then be automatically entered into the system for the user’s convenience. This is the best expense solution that works for other devices, such as tablets, laptops, and mobile phones. Now you can submit the expenses even while you walk through your office’s front door!
- The best part served by an automated system until now is that it can reduce the manual error chances. The GL code data and other manually entered expenses on the spreadsheet require further verification of the tallied receipts with the submitted amounts. This also requires the finance team to manually re-key all the data into an accounting system. This presents a lot of opportunities for the occurrence of human errors at several stages of the expense reimbursement process. And, the problem is enhanced when it makes it impossible to trace the problem. A procurement agent can effectively manage all these issues by combing a sophisticated OCR system with an interpretation technology like a credit card. With such a system, an expense line can go from receipt to submission to approval and reimbursement without doing anything manually.
- Saving the extra time that would have otherwise been spent in submitting and processing the data relating to financial cost is well-served by the expense automated solution. You get the biggest financial advantages when you leverage the data and intelligence with these automated systems. A simple example that can be used is volume discounts: if your procurement agent is aware of how much your company spends on lodging every year, they can discuss the volume discounts with the hotel chains only if they prefer to become your partner. This can make you save up to 20% under standard rates, which can be a profitable deal.
- Relying on manual processes makes it easier for the company employees to commit theft relating to expenses. It is possible that the employees submit the same receipt for two times and eventually round up the mileage expenses. Manual entry of costs makes it really tough to recognize the suspicious claims and follow up with the staff members to solve it. Somebody can easily prevent such expense fraud issues by automating travel expense management. The automated system will instantly pick up the duplicate entries. This will not only help to streamline the efforts but also increase the transparency accordingly.
Of course, these are only a few of the many reasons why you should ask your procurement agent to switch to an automated system. Almost every business traveler will accept that submitting post-trip expenses can be one of the most daunting tasks ever. Implementing an automated system will only mean happy employees, which can ultimately result in improved productivity.
