20 minutes. This is the average time taken for an employee to complete an expense claim, at an average cost to the company of €53. That’s without taking into account human error, which occurs in an average of 20% of expense claims, resulting in twice as much time and money being invested.
Why use expense report software ?
Managing expense claims is often time-consuming because of the complexity of the procedures involved and the number of stakeholders involved in the process: employee, manager, HR expert or back-office accountant, and finance department.
Firstly, the employee enters their expenses once they have collected all their receipts. Once the expense has been passed on to the manager, he or she at least checks that it is legitimate and then approves or rejects it. The accounts department must then check all the expense reports. He must pay attention to each item of evidence and ensure that it is consistent with the expenditure. And only after these checks have been carried out can the employee be reimbursed.
The opportunities for optimising the expense claim management process are there for the taking. We invite you to take a look at the advantages of digitising your expense reports !
1. You save time
As a company grows, so does the administrative burden. The workforce is growing and business expenses are multiplying. It is therefore necessary to save time and increase productivity. And it’s precisely a digital solution that offers you this opportunity.
With a high-performance application, data entry is made much easier. Nowadays, your expense claim application must be equipped with an optical recognition system (OCR). All you have to do is scan the receipt and check the information automatically detected, or add to it if necessary. This makes it quicker and easier for employees to enter their expense claims.
The aim of a digital expense claim solution is to achieve efficiency. You can drastically reduce the time spent declaring, validating and checking your expenses.
It is quicker for the manager to validate the expense claim, since automatic entry reduces the number of errors that regularly occur during manual entry. Control is therefore easier too.
2. You cut costs !
Of course, the time savings inherent in the digital solution are immediately worthwhile, as they reduce the time spent recording, validating and checking expense claims.
What’s more, a complete digital solution means you can do without paper, which is not only environmentally friendly but also reduces the cost of printing, sorting, transport and storage.
Expense management solutions should be chosen with the option of archiving receipts with legal value (standard NF Z 42-013) if your company does not already have such a system.
What’s more, with applications in SaaS mode, upgrades are less costly to implement. No more long project months and IT maintenance costs.
3. You gain in mobility
Flexibility is the keyword for a digital solution.
Why ? Because it allows you to make an expense claim from any location, using your smartphone, computer or tablet.
You can manage your expenses remotely, on the move. Employees no longer need to go to the office to hand in their paper documents or send them by post.
Everything is done instantly, so there’s no need to scan and staple expense claims. It is also rarer to lose an expense claim online than on paper.
4. Secure the management of your business
A very contemporary issue, security is sometimes called into question when data is stored online. And yet, a high-performance application is more secure than manual data entry where papers are stored on premises.
In practical terms, expense claims can be stored in digital safes with evidential value, guaranteeing that the information will last and can be retrieved at a later date.
This type of archiving enables you to keep your expense claims with a triple requirement of authenticity, integrity (no subsequent alteration or modification) and intelligibility (guaranteed readability over time).
As well as encrypting and securing your data, you can back them up more easily and therefore better protect their integrity over the long term.
5. Make your figures more reliable
A digital approach to expense claims increases the effectiveness of controls and facilitates reporting on all expenses. The tool reduces (human) errors and fraud on expenses, makes the associated amounts more reliable and gives your company better financial visibility. This visibility enables you to manage your expenses reliably, accurately and in real time.
In contrast, with a traditional manual approach, you either have to spend time checking or be exposed to the risk of adjustment. Digitalisation allows you to automate controls, making data more reliable and meeting your social and fiscal compliance challenges.
To conclude, let’s adopt the words of Benjamin Franklin in his book The Way to Wealth (1758) : “Every minute spent organising is an hour saved”.
As you will have realised, digitising your expense reports is that little minute that will save you so much time. So what are you waiting for ?
