Questions you should ask before employing Expense Management System

If you are thinking about investing in an Expense Management Software, these are a few questions you should ask yourself

In today’s technology-driven, highly-competitive business world, companies often fall prey to emulating their rivals—be it in products, services or even management ecosystems. This can lead to incurring unnecessary expenditure in setting up systems that may not be a perfect cog in the corporations’ wheel.

Business class travel, top hotels, jet setting lifestyle –might be table stakes for top executives. However, for most employees, corporate travel does not represent luxury,instead it comprises a long and dreary compliance trail that starts much before the business trip and ends long after it is over. With the business & leisure travel trend on the rise, things are becoming even more complicated and tougher to organize as it gets difficult to segregate what expenses to file under business and what as personal.

Meticulous expense tracking, hours of manual reporting, compliance with expense management policies that require employees to submit the smallest of receipts within a limited time for reimbursement, all according to strict company guidelines,is a tiresome, tedious and fraud-sensitive process.

Here are a set of questions that you need to answer that can help you ascertain the requirement for overhauling your current expense management system.

Who are the people that are going to use the system?

With millennial’s comprising a greater share of the workforce, they are demanding quick and easy solutions to workplace realities. Another change that is taking the workplace by storm is digitization. A click of a button can bring a cab, food and household supplies to your doorstep. Employees are expecting the same seamless convenience in their professional lives. Lengthy, time-consuming processes that result in reimbursements a couple of months down the line are just not relevant today.

How does your process fit in with the fact that the world is a global village?

While the world around us is changing, there are a few things that cannot change for a business to function successfully. These are the operational timelines. This just means that if the salary has to go out on the first or the seventh of each month, then it must. Similarly, the expenses must be filed on a specific date every month.

However, what if you can file an expense the minute it is incurred? All from your convenient and handy mobile phone! There is no need for you to save the receipts and run around to get the necessary approvals – something that becomes physically impossible if you are in a different geographical location all together.

There are expense management systems that take away the stress and hassle of compliance by offering one-window approach to help you manage your expenses – no matter what part of the world you are in.

Log in to the app on your phone, see the pre-approved budgets that are allocated for your expenses, use the camera feature of your phone to upload the receipts in real time and, as everything is pre-approved, the reimbursement automatically gets cycled into your account without you having to physically submit any paperwork in office. The whole process works completely independent of your geographical location.

Which system fits your requirements?

Ideally the system that you choose should be compliant with the current government policies and at the same time track expense surpluses, omitted documentation and system-generated reminders for approval delays. The system should be easy to scale, so it grows with your business as your employees grow. One of the most important aspects of a solution is the ongoing support system to handle any back-end issues and training for up-gradations in the same.

The right way to go ahead of these challenges is to have an interactive and engaging system which helps to build an efficient organization.