On-the-go expense management for logistics employees

Logistics service providers who offer supply chain management and logistics solutions operate on a large scale. Their business typically runs out of several hundred, if not thousand locations with a large number of logistics centres and offices. Their employees are constantly on the move shuttling between cities.

Challenges with traditional expense management in logistics companies

For logistics companies to function, employees are required to be on the road every day. The expenses they incur while travelling for work need to be reported. This is typically done by retaining the receipts, attaching them to a form to be submitted manually in the office. The ensuing paperwork is tedious, time-consuming, and highly labour-intensive. This is significantly taxing on both the employees and the managers having to administer and approve the claims. 

• Delay in reimbursement: Usually by the time employees are reimbursed for their expenses of one trip, they have been on several others and have expense reports of their subsequent trips lined up ready to be submitted for reimbursement. 

• Manual Processes: Manually processing everything after working on auditing, budget checks, duplication etc., makes for highly delayed reimbursements. This causes delayed reimbursements due to longer processing time making it frustrating for both the finance teams and for the employees. 

• Staying Compliant: Additionally, finance teams have to ensure every expense report adheres to very strict compliance policies. This requires them to be meticulous as they manually itemize receipts and go over each report to check for any discrepancies.  

Expense management for the road

To move beyond the cumbersome, labour-intensive, and time-consuming process of manual expense management automation is the way forward. Particularly when catering to employees on-the-go shifting to an automated expense management system for digitally filing expenses simplifies the entire process. 

Digitizing expenses on the go allows logistics employees to save details and submit reports of their expenses directly from an app on their smartphone. Digitization streamlines the entire process simplifying expense management on the road through the following: 

• It eliminates the need to preserve the physical receipts and invoices until they get back to the office. 
• They simply need to scan, upload, and send. Managers can then approve the expenses online. 
• All the steps are automatically registered in the financial administration database.

The digitization of receipts that occurs due to automation eliminates the need for physical records while simultaneously helping logistics companies comply with existing fiscal regulations by securely storing the scanned copies for auditing purposes.

How does it work?

Zaggle Save works by leveraging Optical Character Recognition [OCR]. This is a technology with the ability to digitize written text or printed letters. 

Computers by themselves cannot recognize or interpret characters from scanned documents or images. OCR helps bridge this gap by helping the computer make sense of the image, recognize the characters, and record it for further processing.

OCR enables conversion of different types of documents into a preferred format that is recognized. OCR is leveraged for various reasons such as capturing payment receipts, avoiding fraudulent transactions, converting handwriting into digital text, and clearing cheques by automatically confirming handwritten information. 

All of these features eventually help an organisation go paperless saving the finance team hours of work of having to sift through piles of paper receipts. 

On-the-go reimbursement with Zaggle Save

Ritesh is an employee of ABC Logistics, based out of Banalore. He is currently in Hyderabad waiting for his restaurant bill. Upon paying the bill, he opens the Zaggle mobile app on his smartphone and takes a photo.

The app, equipped with OCR, reads and interprets the content. The sophisticated algorithm built-in does the heavy lifting and captures the receipts. The expense gets registered within his account and in the database for future reference. He goes about his day without having to worry about safety or storage of the physical copy of the receipt. 

Upon reaching the outskirts of Hyderabad, the Zaggle app integrated to his corporate email id allows him to send the captured receipts from the duration of his trip. The app reviews the uploaded documents and sends him a notification saying that his submission is complete. 

At the end of a long day, Ritesh checks the app to see that the reimbursement is being processed. The next morning as he is on his tea break from driving down to Bangalore, he gets a notification saying that the reimbursement has been initiated. He goes about his day without stress and is able to be at his productive best.

The Zaggle expense management system allows logistics companies to simplify business payments. This makes it easy for employees to be on the road without having to worry about reimbursements.

Zaggle Save understands the strategic imperative to stay ahead of the curve. Our all-in-one business spends management platform helps you spend smarter while saving time, money, and effort. 

Start simplifying your organizations’ expense management today. Please reach out if you have any questions.