Do you know how much time you’re spending on expense reporting?
If you don’t, you’re not alone. An overwhelming number of businesses today, ranging from sole traders to multinational organisations, are unaware of just how long they spend tallying up old receipts and logging and processing their expenses.
A study conducted by GBTA Foundation and HRS in 2015, showed that it takes around 20 minutes to conduct a single expense report and about one fifth will have errors that will take an additional 18 minutes to correct. $67.88 and 23.4 minutes of work for a single expense report means that your company is probably losing an enormous amount of time and capital over an extended period of time. Using a quick example of an SME with 50 employees, 10 of whom may have to perform expense reporting with an average of 2 per employee per month, equates to 240 expense reports per year, costing over $16,000 and will take on average 93 hours of time. Time that could be spent on growing your business!
Think about the steps involved in submitting a typical expense report:
- Logging Transactions – the employee has to input the details of all transactions including details such as category, vendor, dates and more.
- Scanning Receipts – This is a tedious and time consuming task as receipts often need to be saved in a specific format for auditing purposes.
- Missing Receipts – All the receipts may not be there and you need to chase employees to provide them. A survey by Taille showed that the biggest pain point for companies is employees losing their paper receipts.
- Matching Receipts – When you finally get the receipt you have to manually match crumpled receipts against each individual transaction.
- Report Approvals – once the employee has finished compiling their expense reports, these typically then need to be signed off by their manager who needs to sift through the report and matching receipts and identify any errors or compliance issues. The manager will usually have multiple reports to approve and will receive these are different times, distracting them from more impactful activities.
- Correcting Errors – time-poor employees will typically rush through the reporting process, leaving room for errors. Once these errors are identified, the report is sent back to the employee for correction before again going through the approval process.
- Finance Department Approval – post the approval from the manager, the report then needs to be reviewed and approved by the finance department. They will follow the same steps of sifting through each expense and reviewing the receipt copy to ensure everything matches.
- Reimbursement – Once the report is finally signed off by the finance department, it then needs to be repaid to the employee. This is another time consuming process of bank transfer, cash or cheque issuance or inclusion in the employee salary payment.
Given the number of steps and room for manual error involved, it should come as no surprise that nearly half of all companies take more than a week to complete the processes from submission to reimbursement.
Why companies manage the expense reporting process in this complicated way is easy to understand. Until recently there have not been automated solutions to help simplify the process.
What companies need in order to correct this process is:
- More visibility into the expense data
- More control over employee spending
- A reduction of expense report processing costs
- Elimination of out-of-policy expenses
Qashio will give you all this and more.
Spend less on your spending and take control of your company today.
Reach out to one of our specialists today and learn how your company can reduce expenses and increase your profits!
