Many businesses feel trapped when they are handling their expenses, especially if they have outdated and manual approaches.
It not just only drags down efficiency and comes with more potential errors to throw off financial reporting and analytics.
Automate expense reporting makes the process more scalable while saving both effort and time.
However, to leverage the technology and process, here is what you should do.
Table of contents
What is Automating Expense Reporting?
Automating expense reporting includes using software to digitize as well as simplify the process of tracking, approving and overall reimbursing expenses.
Having a centralized platform and efficient expense reports for employees to submit via mobile apps while HR managers can gain real time visibility into the expense.
This eliminates the manual process and tasks like paper receipts and data entry, reducing the overall errors and speeding up the process.
Top 6 Benefits of Automating Expense Reporting For HR
Having an efficient expense report through automation can help in providing smooth planning, organizing, and control over where the employees are spending their expenses.
Besides this, here are some of the top benefits for HR:
1. Free Up from Manual Workload
Manual expenses are a consuming process whether it’s for employees, HR, or finance teams. As for HR staff, they spend more than 57% of their time handling administrative tasks which leaves little time to handle strategic tasks.
They must process the submissions, cross-check the receipts, and manage approvals.
Not only does it divert your attention from actual important stuff like making strategic approaches for performance management or better employee engagement.
But it also loads up extra work on the plate.
- This is where automated expense reporting helps digitize and streamline the process from submission to reimbursements.
- It helps centralize everything on one platform.
- It requires less time to follow each step, reducing the errors or clarification which provides more time to focus on what’s important.
- Also, it reduces internal friction and boosts the overall efficiency of operational needs.
Tips for HR: Choose the expense reporting software which allows easy integration with existing HRMS or payroll tools to have data sync, preventing duplication and hassle.
2. Reduce Risks & Improve Policy Compliance
Manual processes cause more inconsistencies when enforcing the company policies, which increases the risks of non-compliance and fraud.
- Having an automated system can embed the policy rules directly into the platform.
- It also flags or rejects expenses if they violate the company rules or policies.
- Having consistent policy enforcement protects from causing potential fraud, ensuring fairness, and maintaining regulatory standards.
Tips for HR: Make sure you are updating and defining the expense policies within the automation tool. Also ensure they reflect current company standards with all needed requirements.
3. Boost The Employee Experience & Their Satisfaction
Having a cumbersome expense process can cause frustration to your employees. This also causes a reduction in their productivity and lowers morale.
- With an automated option, it allows them to submit their expenses directly to the platform with much more ease via mobile apps.
- Also, it helps in managing to track the status of reimbursements in real time.
- With a streamlined process, you can improve employee satisfaction and trust in the administrative procedure of the organizations.
Tips For HR: Having compressive training can help your employees to have better control and comfort leading to higher adaptation rates and lowering errors.
4. Makes Real-Time Tracking for Budget Oversight
Expense data can be easily scattered as there are multiple channels used, also it allows HR and finance to get a clear picture of overall spending patterns.
- Having an automation process helps in leveraging real time expense tracking, improving where the money is going and centering the data into one place.
- This is critical for providing better budgeting, training expenditures, or reimbursements based on roles and departments.
- Trends can easily be monitored, helping to have budget oversight and overall process.
- It provides HR with visibility into non-salary employee costs, providing data-backed decision-making and resource allocation.
Tip for HR: Use a system that offers you visible dashboards providing filters and helping you to have better control.
5. Streamlined Approvals to Cut Down on Delays
One of the major bottlenecks you face using the traditional system is the appeal cycle itself.
This makes employees wait for managers to respond or approve their emails or sign off the printed reports.
Without an expense automation, it makes their reimbursements delay and cause dissatisfaction impacting on overall performance.
- The automated expense report helps in creating automated routine expense claims and smoother workflows.
- Also ensures the employee gets approvals on time, sending reminders and reducing overdue tasks for HR.
- Not only does it have a faster turnaround, but the process also creates happier and more satisfied employees, improving the organization’s image overall.
Tips For HR: Ensure you have customized workflows based on the department and roles to add a more structured and efficient chain of command.
6. Improve Accuracy & Data Security
When you use a paper-based system, managing data accuracy in records can be challenging. Also, human error causes breaches around 88% leading to serious threats to the company.
Also, it causes documents to end up lost or damaged causing an issue of audits.
- Automated expense management systems help in securing the store all the expenses providing much more data digitally.
- Also with detailed information, it helps in audit trials to have a recording system for each transaction.
- Digital records also simplify the audit process as they ensure compliance and lower the penalties of risks associated with using inadequate documents.
Tips for HR: Make sure you are choosing a system that complies with data protection regulations and offers security features to protect data sensitivity and company information.
Common Mistakes To Avoid in Automating Expense Reporting
While having all the benefits of automated expense reporting, understanding some mistakes that usually happen hinders the process.
Here are some of the pointers to know.
- When introducing the system, it makes employees feel the struggle to handle it. Also, this is why having proper training is important, and conducting a workshop or user-friendly guide is helpful.
- Lack of integration and ignoring your current system makes existing cause more inefficiencies. It’s crucial to have software that seamlessly integrates the tools.
- Missing our insights from analytics tools can cause a hassle for financial planning. This is where you need better analytics features to align with your goals.
- Outdated policies within the system cause the issues, and this is where regular reviews and updates are embedded in the system.
Conclusion
For HR, automated expense reporting is not just upgrading technology but also creating smarter, faster, and more employee-friendly processes.
With benefits like real-time expense tracking, lowering errors or inaccuracies to have happier employees, it creates more efficient strategy steps towards organizational growth.
This is where HROne offers you an all-in-one solution along with powerful expense automation features aligning with HR strategy.