What is Expense Report Automation?
What is Expense Report Automation?
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August 15, 2023
Table of Contents
- What are Expense Reports?
- Situations where Expense Reports are Necessary
- What’s it’s Expense Report Automation?
- How Expense Report Automation Works?
- Benefits of Automated Expense Reporting
- How to Implement Expense Report Automation
What are Expense Reports?
In an ideal world, you’ll have a completely digital procurement software for internal purchases, working with p-cards or similar, making everyone happy. However, things like expense reports are still needed.
Expense reports are not necessarily bad, but the problem is that employees have to manually create a document that could be as large as the amount of receipts and bills they have to attach.
Situations where Expense Reports are Necessary
Even if you have a digital method for your employees to make purchases, there might be situations where they have to pay with their own money.
- If it’s a new employee and they don’t have access yet to virtual cards
- If the corporate card is forgotten or lost
- The vendor doesn’t accept cards and wants only cash
- Problems with the cards themselves
What’s it’s Expense Report Automation?
Expense report automation is simply the act of using technology to make the creation of expense reports an easy task. Instead of spending hours writing everything down, your team uses digital solutions—usually a mobile app—to record the expenses and send them for approval.
How Expense Report Automation Works?
Let’s say you are the person purchasing with your own money and now you are wondering how to send the receipt to your manager.
Take a picture
Most expense report automation systems work on mobile phones, utilizing the phone's camera. With a good system, you can use a mobile app to scan your receipts instantly; the app employs optical character recognition (OCR) to extract important data like amounts and dates directly from the receipts.
Data is recorded
By using the app to scan a receipt, the information is automatically entered into your expense report without the need for tedious spreadsheets.
Approval workflow
Automated systems can send your expense reports to the right managers for approval. Notifications alert them when their action is needed, speeding up the process.
Reimbursement
The timing of reimbursement will depend on the company’s policies, but it’s common to process payments at the end of the month.
Benefits of Automated Expense Reporting
It saves time
Automated systems allow you to quickly submit expenses using a mobile app while finance teams can approve reports efficiently.
Reduces errors
Features like receipt scanning and integration with accounting software ensure that all expenses are recorded accurately, minimizing manual mistakes.
Happy employees
Automation reduces frustration by simplifying submissions and providing quick feedback on approvals.
Visibility into spending
Automated systems include tracking features, helping you to monitor the spending habits of your team.
How to Implement Expense Report Automation
Search your options
Focus on options that include features like mobile receipt capture, real-time expense tracking, and analytics dashboards.
Get feedback
Listen to your team's opinions on what features they’d find most helpful to ensure the tool meets their needs.
Amy Deiko is a procurement writer and MBA student with a passion for innovative business processes.