The Hidden Costs of Manual Expense Management

While travel and entertainment (T&E) accounts for 10-12% of the annual budget, how much money is your company allocating to expense management overall? It may be more than you think. If your company manages expenses manually with spreadsheets, paper receipts and printed expense reports—there may be several time- and money-draining processes to consider eliminating.

The Hidden Cost of Manual Review Do managers and accountants spend hours each week manually reviewing expense reports? The review process can be a tedious one, including expense report approval, manager review (and subsequent accountant review), expense reconciliation, and processing for reimbursement.

Consider the average hourly rate of an accountant, and the number of hours per month spent manually reviewing expense reports and entering data into an accounting system. Over the course of a year, a manual review process becomes quite costly.

The Hidden Cost of Paper Expense Reports Employees who regularly submit expense reports know the tedium of saving receipts, entering data into a spreadsheet, stapling expenses together and remembering to submit their expense report on time. This manual method is a waste of the employees’ time and the company’s money—consider these hidden costs tied to paper expense reports:

Time spent on manual expense reporting: Tracking and organizing paper receipts Creating expense reports in Excel Mailing reports to manager or accountant Waiting for approval and reconciliation Waiting for reimbursement

Money spent on manual expense reporting: Wages for employees, managers and accountants to manual enter expense data Office supplies tied to expense reports such as paper, printer ink, staples, etc. Postage costs to mail expense reports (often overnighted to meet deadlines) Storage space to file past expense reports in the event of an audit Delinquent credit card payment fees due to late expense reports As more leading companies move to web-based expense management, it’s clear that automation is a cost-effective alternative to traditional expense reporting. Manual data entry, approval time, reimbursement time and paper use can all be significant reduced—if not eliminated—saving substantial time and money. To learn more about how automation can benefit your company, we’d be happy to show you how it works.

Mobile Expense Management A Necessary Aspect to Control

If you are a business man then you have to take good care of your expenses and in this world of latest technologies expenses also increased along with the facilities as every facility had its own expense so in the case of mobile facilities. Though, mobile is providing the best facilities and support you business quite well and keep you up to date with the latest information and also help you to keep in touch with your employees. As I mentioned earlier every facility has its own expenses so in the case of mobile phones.

Mobile expense management is a very daunting task as due to its mobile nature and its need it becomes very difficult to control and to bring your own device under the control is comparatively easier than the one you have given to your employers so we will discuss about a solution of this problem here. The best way of Mobile Expense Management is that you make contract with the service provider companies.

Now day's different companies also realize the difficulties of the people and offering different types of contracts. The main aspects of contracts which I have generalized as different companies have different policies but I have extracted common points to make you understand about advantages of contacts. First of all by making contract you will get comparatively lower rates than the ordinary ones and secondly you also pave limit to the expenses by drawing some limits to every connection and ask your employees to bring your own device expenses under this limit. Third one is you can get various advantages like free messaging or free use of communication tools which help you to communicate freely with your employees. You can also save yourself from monthly extra charges and enjoy uninterrupted services as if you may late in the payment of bills but if you are in contract with the company then you need not to worry about that. So these are some advantages which are common in contracts of every business.

So in this way you can control your expenses of mobile phones and make your expenses in control which is necessary for the success of your business. In business you have to take care of each and every aspect and I hope this will help you to make one necessary aspect to control it easily.

Company Travel Expenses Management Solutions

Companies that deal with traveling employees know how demanding and costly business travel can be. In fact, if your employees travel extensively, this category can be one of the top five expense areas in your business. There is always the need to reach a balance between ensuring that traveling employees have what they need to do business in the field, while managing company spending.

The company travel expenses management software offers you the chance to manage how company money is spent, where it is spent and on what it is spent on. Your traveling employees can easily work and access the tool to create expense reports showing what and how they are spending money.

While traveling, your employees simply need to use their Internet-enabled devices to log in, create and upload their expense reports. You get to see all expenses being met, which have been approved and even release funds to cover costs accrued. As such, when and if you see unwarranted and wanton expenditures, you could easily disapprove them and sent them back to submitter to rework.