Introduction
Globalization has blurred geographical barriers and it is not unusual for an organization to have employees, clients, and teams located in different parts of the world. While this has ushered in many overall advantages for companies, it has also led to Human Resource and Finance teams struggling with the monitoring and approval of business travel expenses.
Despite the growth of digital technology and the availability of online conferencing and meeting options, about 80% of business travelers feel that they would prefer to travel and have face-to-face meetings over online video calls. The Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) has also forecasted an increase in global business travel costs to USD 1.7 trillion dollars by 2022.
Here are the top challenges that businesses face with their expense management processes and the ways to overcome them same.
Top Expense Management Challenges in Business Travel
The types of expenses incurred varies from one company to another, which means your organization will have its own unique expense categories and subcategories according to which you would draft your expense reports. Also, the expenses keep on compounding as unique tasks are initiated and new partnerships are made.
1. Unclear expenditure reports
Most companies still use traditional or manual processes for expense management. This makes it very difficult for the management to identify the kind of expenses accounted for and then approve or deny them. As a result, a lot of reports that reach the senior management are highly edited, randomly created, and inaccurate.
However, when you invest in good expense management software, you get the power to track expenses in real-time and with precision. Such software solutions ensure that the expense reports are clear, well-defined, and easy to analyze.
2. Time-consuming processes
Imagine a large organization with hundreds of employees taking short and long business trips throughout the month. At the end of a month, the HR team will receive thousands of receipts and will have hundreds of expense approvals to handle. This is naturally going to take days to process. Employees will also need to spend a lot of time collecting receipts, grouping them, and filling up relevant spreadsheets.
Some companies might have to put in up to 3 times the effort in just processing expense report submissions. This is a waste of precious time that could have been devoted to priority tasks.
So, one of the top advantages of investing in an automated travel expense management solution is the ease of handling receipts and reports. These solutions come with receipt readers/scanners that automatically check the contents of a receipt and group the expenses correctly. Some software solutions even identify duplicate receipts and send out alerts.
3. Submission and processing delays
There can be two major problems that might occur after an employee completes a trip:
-
- Employees take a lot of time to submit the relevant documents to the HR team.
- The HR and the finance team delay the processing/approval of the reimbursement request.
Either way, delayed reimbursements can bring down the morale of the employee.
Now, the good news is that automatic approval workflow is a major advantage of travel expense management tools. Unless there are red flags in the submitted receipts, the reimbursement approval process is majorly automated and quick.
By using a software tool, it is also easy for employees to make additional requests in a matter of seconds. All of these make travel expense submissions simple and hassle-free.
Conclusion
Automated tools are the future of travel expense management. They bring down the need for excessive manual efforts while creating and approving business travel claims. So, if you have been struggling with outdated or manual travel and expense management systems, give such tools a try. These make claims and reimbursement approvals super easy and you can get your team to perform efficiently with minimal or nil errors.
