Automate expense approvals to speed up reimbursement

A typical organization incurs hundreds of expenses daily. Consequently, manual expense approval becomes a cumbersome task, and employees are kept waiting for their reimbursements.

An expense approval workflow consists of a series of sequentially-laid out tasks to approve and process the expense. When such workflows are automated, it removes bottlenecks, streamlines processes, enhances productivity, and fast-tracks approval and payment.

Expense reimbursement: The current scenario

For businesses managing expenses manually, end-to-end expense automation is the need of the hour because of the following reasons – 

1. Manual management of bills and vouchers, using excel spreadsheets and scanned receipts, is a tedious and time-consuming task as it involves thousands of hours of unproductive data entry, causing delays in approval and reimbursement. Moreover, this method is prone to frequent errors.
2. A single expense may involve several people and require multiple approvals.
3. Organizations often suffer from poor visibility into their expense data and lose control over business travel and other expense spending.
4. Poor visibility also leads to budgetary lapses and fraud.
5. The higher processing cost of expensing incurs more person-hours.

In such a situation, automating expense approval workflows is the key to reducing errors, ensuring compliance with the industry laws, audit trails, and the company’s expense policies, and minimizing reimbursement delays.

How an automated expense approval system benefits your organization?

An automated expense approval system offers several advantages that streamline the entire process and speed up reimbursement – 

1. Eliminates manual errors

Without an automated expense approval system in place, the probability of manual errors is always high. However, running expenses through a structured, automated workflow ensures there are no accounting errors because an employee entered the wrong numbers for a particular expense.

2. Facilitates ease of use

With a visual, user-friendly interface, built-in templates, and drag-and-drop tools, organizations can easily create an expense approval chain, including defining the business rules and other configurations that perfectly suit their business needs.

3. Ensures adherence to general expense policies

An automated expense approval system identifies discrepancies and throws up a warning when a claim violates the company’s expense policy. Since the system ensures adherence to corporate policy, finance teams find it easier to accept or reject a request, and expense reimbursement is expedited.

4. Tax benefits and audit trails

To claim legitimate tax benefits, travel and other expense entries must be recorded systematically. Moreover, correctly maintained records and audit trails ensure the company does not open itself to accusations of mismanagement or embezzlement of funds.

5. Happier and more productive staff

When employees don’t have access to a user-friendly and organized expense approval system, submitting expenses and waiting for claims can become a tiresome job that hampers their efficiency. Therefore, an automated expense approval system plays a crucial role in speeding up claim reimbursement and keeping the staff satisfied and productive. 

6. Expense management on-the-go

With a responsive, mobile-friendly design, employees can quickly complete expense reports and check the status of their pending claims on their phones. On the flip side, managers can review and approve expenses on-the-go, making the whole procedure faster and easier.

7. Helps keep tabs on the financial health

Using interactive dashboards and reports available right inside the automated expense approval system, management can keep track of the expenses, ensure the stipulated budget is adhered to, and also identify areas in which unnecessary cost is being incurred. 

How can Zaggle help speed up your reimbursements?

Zaggle SAVE, our digital expense management solution, brings together all your employees and expenses on a centralized platform, giving you 100% control and visibility over company-wide expenditure, anytime, across any device.  

Our expense reporting software is crafted for businesses of all sizes and helps achieve 7x faster processing of expenses. Employees spend using the Zaggle VISA card and simply need to click a picture of the receipt to create an expense automatically. The approver can view each expense with its corresponding receipt and approve or reject the claim, as required.

The online dashboard is updated in real-time and allows management to stay on top of company expenses.

Some of the useful features of our software include – 

1. Create suitable expense approval workflows using the custom or criteria-based approval options.
2. Optical character recognition (OCR) converts printed text on bills and stores it as digital data.
3. Employees can create expenses in any currency.
4. The staff can raise a detailed travel request, including information such as airline, cab, and meal preferences.
5. A GPS-enabled mileage tracker and an odometer mileage tracker help log mileage expenses automatically.
6. Approver can set up preferences, such as bill mandatory, documents required, daily expense limit, etc.

To know more about the exciting capabilities of our automated expense management system, please feel free to schedule a personalized consultation with our experts.