Top five benefits of automating expense processes

Manual processing of time and expense (T&E) reports can be tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error. Statistics have shown that, on average, as much as 10% of operating expenses are related to processing T&E reports, and that 20% of those expenses fail to adhere to corporate policies.

Automating T&E processes, on the other hand, can have a significant impact on productivity by eliminating laborious tasks – time your employees can reallocate to activities that directly contribute to your organization’s bottom line.

Expense Automation Benefits

1. Reduce costs by simplifying expense processes

Automating and simplifying your T&E processes can result in significant cost savings. Traditionally, managing expenses has been cumbersome and paper-intensive resulting in documentation overload and delays. By automating processes with an expense management solution like ReQlogic, companies can not only minimize their environmental footprint, but they can drastically reduce time spent on submitting, reviewing, and processing reports.

ReQlogic makes expense submissions and reviews fast and easy. The automated expense solution allows users to include comments and attach any number of documents such as receipts, boarding passes, or signed work orders. The time employees save on managing expense reports can now be used for more productive tasks.

2. Enforce corporate expense policies

Enforcing your company’s expense policy is essential for controlling operating costs. Non-automated T&E submission processes can result in potentially costly errors due to incorrect data or unauthorized approvals. By streamlining and automating processes companies can implement safeguards that allow for prompt identification and flagging of any non-compliant issues without having to manually compare expenses and rules.

3. Ensure accuracy with automated workflows

Automated workflows allow for standardized processes that minimize processing time and reduce errors. The workflow capacity of ReQlogic is uniquely broad and deep in that it can be based on any field in any table and incorporate unlimited routing rules or approval levels. These rules or approval levels can be set up sequentially, parallel, or branch out to other conditional policies. The approval workflow can be based on the total amount of an expense report, the expense category, the project or task, or the dollar amount of a particular line item. The system can be set up so that employees are required to attach documents or enter notes when selecting specific expense categories – providing standardized parameters that ensure projects and tasks stay within budget.

4. Improve transparency and identify trends

To control costs, companies must know where they are spending their money. Such data needs to be timely, accurate, and easily accessible. Automated expense management solutions make it easy for an organization’s leadership team to capture data to review spending and identify any trends. The information can then be used to evaluate budgets, forecast spending, and negotiate volume-based discounts with suppliers.

5. Increase employee satisfaction through faster expense reimbursements

Typically, your employees are spending their own money, so a long delay between expense submission and reimbursement can be frustrating. An expense management solution can minimize processing time through faster submission and approval.

ReQlogic empowers employees by enabling them to submit time and expenses on-the-go via their mobile devices. Reports are automatically submitted to the right person for review and approval, thus significantly reducing reimbursement cycles.

Automating T&E Helps Financial Performance

Implementing standardized processes for managing time and expenses can have a substantial impact on an organization’s financial performance. The key to streamlining T&E management is to implement a solution that is easy to use and can incorporate automated data validation rules.