How to manage your T&E budget with expense management automation solution?

Just a few days back, I was talking with a CFO of one of the large FMCG group and he described one of the biggest challenges that he was facing. As per the organization’s strategic goal, he needs to invest in improving sales and distribution network to grow revenue. It, in turn, needs a robust travel and entertainment budget. When I asked him if budget is the issue, he said no. In fact, he said the budget is least of an issue. The main challenge he was facing was on the timely submission of claims by employees and also the ability to control the expenses as employees take time to submit claims and he is not aware of how much of money is already spent. This eventually results in a fight between finance and other departments and demoralizes the employee. So he was looking for expense automation solution which can give his employees ease of entering claims through their mobile, saving the receipts by taking pictures and submitting quickly giving him an idea about the budget consumption.

The Problem

The biggest challenge in current T&E process is about the inconvenience of employees to enter their expenses leading to a lack of visibility regarding the liability of organization at any point of time.

This overall lack of visibility doesn’t give managers keen insight into how and where employees are spending company funds. Inappropriate spend and overspend already may occur before anyone approves expenses or even reviews the reports.

The Solution

There is a solution that allows financial officers to maintain control of the budget while increasing employee satisfaction, that too, without spending every waking moment crunching numbers. And that solution is to streamline and improve travel and expense management practices. One of the easiest ways to do so is to invest in expense management automation software that is tailored to the company’s needs.

Key features of Expense Management Automation Solution:

• Ability to integrate expense management technology into existing web and online platforms including ERP software.
• Ability to photograph, store and submit receipts on mobile devices, removing the hassle of paper receipts.
• Ability to reduce the time it takes for manual expense reporting with an automated system of claim creation. Quicker processing of expenses results in increased productivity and shorten reimbursement cycles.
• Provision for real-time visibility of how, where and when employees are spending
• Workflow-based integration across various stakeholders including employees, managers and finance departments

Flologic’s Intelligent Expense Management Automation Solution covers the 5 important steps in expense management:

1. Requisition
   The process starts with raising a travel request or expense budget request
2. Spend
   In this step, the employee spends the money allocated or officiates travel
3. Capture
   This is the most important step where the employee is able to open the mobile app, snap the receipt and initiate the conversion of receipt to expense line item. The expense management automation solution understands the content of the receipt and creates the expense under an appropriate header like food, boarding, travel, accommodation etc.
4. Report:
   This is the activity where multiple line items are grouped into a claim that needs to be submitted. It can be done at the end of a particular trip or otherwise, can be done at an interval defined by the organization.
5. Approve and Reimbursement:
   In this final step, the manager approves the claim and forwards it to the finance department. Since all the supporting documentation is already attached to this claim, the finance team is able to quickly verify the claim and initiates the reimbursement payment if any.

With this intelligent expense management automation solution customized for an organization and integrated with its existing system, the organizations can achieve the nirvana of accurate expense reporting and tracking resulting in optimum spend.