Technology has completely changed the way business are dealing with their accounting and financial aspect of their business organization. However expense management is one such function that has not seen much innovation from a longer period of time. And what more particularly unfortunate is that most of consider this to be an insignificant part of the business organizations where as it is the most significant part of the organization. Studies have shown that 8 out 10 business organizations even today are using spreadsheets while managing the business expenses of their organization. Given below are the six major tactics that make travel expense management easy for you and your business organization.
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Making use of the smart phones:
Though there are different and specific expense management apps being made available to you, they would just serve as the double if you have to use specific business app. Through the smart phones you could take the photographs of all the receipts for the expenses made, and in turn gain legally binding copy. If your employer here insist on paper, print out picture when you return to office and for a maximum efficiency you could here use a note taking app to store the data and keeping it tagged for easy retrieval.
Start with simple and trying it before you buy:
The next step while dealing with travel expense management is to use a simple version of an automated expense management software that would not just capture but would even track down the expenses related to your organization. And while using it you might want to be sure of the following things: Has an easy to use mobile app for frequent travellers, is hosted in the cloud, and the last but not the least has a free trial version so you can see if it works out for you.
Having your policy put in action:
Have a thought on this if your team could manage their business activities on their smart phones then why not expenses. So try and empower your team with the mobile expense reporting and the management tools so that they could report and manage the expenses on the go from anywhere saving their time and making them more productive enough.
Get your employees use the software:
Have your employees prepared to make use of the software before it expires, and get opinions from people around the business. Do not forget that the employees, the finance team and the travel managers, and the others are responsible enough for travel and all the other expense budgets using the software getting their input before you buy whatever is helpful.
Putting a clear, simple and fair expense policy in place:
Expense policy is nothing but having your organizations company rules and guidelines towards business related business. It would give your business and employees an overview of what has to be expected and what can, cannot claimed before in advance. Having a simple and a fair policy to understand, the employees here would know is been expected from them and you would not have to deal with unnecessary questions and the finance team processing your expenses without any hurdles.
Designated location for lost receipts:
Especially on the roads you could accumulate a lot of receipts quickly and easily. And even though it might seem to be tempting enough because of your credit card and cash are in there your wallet is never considered to be ideal unless and until you have got sufficient space in order to keep the required receipts related to the expenses of your organization. So the most important thing you need to do here is have a location set no matter what. And once you get all the receipts place them there and do not store them as you cannot claim them through location wise.
So do you have expense management software strategies that would help you saving your time and money? If yes, how have they worked out for you? Do leave your thoughts and comments below.
Shivli Ratul is a freelancer and has experience of over 5 years in expense and travel management softwares. She has in-depth knowledge about managing travel and different type of expenses incurred in business. She writes about Travel Expense Management as a freelancer.
