Benefits Of Automated Expense Management Software For Enforcing Policy Compliance

Spend Management Software Helps in Enforcing Policy Compliance

Traditional paper-based expense management processes are error-prone, inefficient, and waste a lot of manhours. On average, companies spend 20 minutes to process one expense claim, according to a Global Business Travel Association report. The study also claimed that companies end up spending anywhere in the range of $20 to $58 for every report. This cost takes into account non-compliance penalties, overpayments, and printing and mailing of paper receipts.

All of this hassle can be avoided through spend management software. Let’s understand how.

Policy compliance becomes employees’ second nature

In spite of having an expense policy, it may be difficult for businesses to keep their expenses under control. Employees will often violate the policies either by mistake or otherwise. The success of your policy depends on how religiously your employees follow it. Depending on how extensive your policy is, it becomes difficult for employees to remember every clause. But by integrating your expense policy into your expense automation software, you can automate policy enforcement. It significantly reduces inconsistencies in employee spending.

Further, using a mobile app of spend management software like XPNS, you can trigger alerts or reminders anytime the employee attempts an out-of-policy transaction. This way, you can eliminate fraud at its inception.

Seamless and employee-friendly process

Unlike manual expense reporting that involves employees preserving and handing over paper receipts, and managing expenses on Excel sheets, expense automation software makes everything easy.

With a digital platform, employees can submit a digital copy of the receipts as soon as they make a purchase. The automated workflows make it easier for the finance team to quickly access the expense reports and process the claims even before the employees come knocking for reimbursements. They can assess the legitimacy of the bills, and also check if the purchase complies with the company policy. It significantly reduces the time that finance teams spend on expense management.

Eliminates scope of fraudulent activities

Fraudulent expense claims form a major compliance issue for businesses. Employees resort to a number of notorious practices like inflating bills, submitting fake receipts, and so on. To spot these manually, finance teams could take months, and they will likely be exposed long after reimbursements.

But with robust spend management software, you can automate the verification of expense claims right when they are submitted. The tool can flag irregular spending or discrepancies in expense reports so that you can reduce instances of fraud.

One strategy that expense automation software allows is budget pre-approval. The system can generate a reasonable estimation of total travel costs, giving you a fair idea of the total budget.

Comprehensive visibility into business spend

Spend management software equips you with a dashboard where you can see your company expenses in real time. In addition, you can also generate reports and insights to assess your expense management strategy. Using these analytics, you can quickly identify the areas that are leaking money and address them. Creating these reports through traditional processes is highly impractical.

Achieve expense policy compliance with automation

Sticking to the traditional methods of managing company expenses on spreadsheets isn’t feasible. Errors, frauds, and resource drain will mar such processes. It will also leave your expense policy unyielding. By investing in a spend management software like XPNS, you can ensure implementation policy compliance by not just making your employees familiar with it but also adopting it.