One of the responsibilities of running a company or business is handling monthly expense reports, which simply details a company’s profits and expenses for the month (such as income, tax payments, employee reimbursements, etc.).
Improving your company’s expense report processing and management may not be the most exciting thing to do by any means, but it’s also necessary to help streamline your business and make it more efficient as a whole.
With that said, here are four tactics you can use to improve your company’s monthly expense reports:
1 – Switch To The Cloud
There’s a reason why many companies these days are transitioning over to cloud based expense reports: it’s easier, cheaper, and more efficient to use.
In all honesty, there’s not much reason to be handling expense reports manually on paper in this day and age. You should switch to a fully automated system, and storing data and processing reports in the cloud will also be a superior option in contrast to physical hard rives.
2 – Use Mobile Expense Report Software
The members of your company can also use apps to keep track of mobile expense claims as they go.
There are a wide variety of apps, both free and paid, that your employees can use to keep track of their spending while they are away from the office, such as required business trips. When they update the app, it can be sent directly to your accounts payable or accounting team back at your physical establishment to further help streamline the process.
3 – Analyze Trends
There’s a wealth of information to be had if you go automated and ditch paper when it comes to your monthly expense reports. This is because expense management software will take data and convert it into graphs, bars, and trend lines for you to take a look at with a quick glance.
The information from these trends will enable your company to make more informed decisions. For example, if you’ve been wanting to cut back on costs, the information that expense report software gives you should make it clear in regards to where those cuts should be made.
4 – Have Your Employees Verify Their Travel Expenses
If your company has a policy of reimbursing your employees for any or some business travel expenses, then you will need to have a way to have those employees verify those expenses, or else there is a very good chance that expense fraud could become a significant issue that costs you thousands of dollars annually.
The best way to have your employees verify their travel expenses would be to turn in valid receipts for each expense they claim, and you can digitize this process as well.
Improving Your Company’s Monthly Expense Reports
The tactics that we have covered here today are only a small handful of the many more your company can use to improve the management of your monthly expense reports.