How to take the hassle out of business expenses

For employees out in the field, bookkeeping staff, and payroll professionals, expense management is a necessity. It’s also a hassle. Keeping track and submitting expenses is one thing. Pairing them with the correct receipts and ensuring they’re correctly accounted for in bookkeeping and payroll systems is another. Then there’s the need to keep employees happy by making timely and accurate reimbursements.

Manual methods of managing expenses – from pen and paper to spreadsheets – are time-consuming and wide open to errors. From missing receipts to duplicate claims, mistakes are costly in terms of time and money. Surely there’s a better way? In this blog post, we look at why expenses are a hassle and how to make managing them easier for everyone involved.

Why business expenses are a hassle

Business expenses are a necessity we could all do without. For employees, getting their money back on expense claims is a hassle. Keeping the right documentation, recording the right details, and getting the right authorisation takes time. It’s easy to lose a receipt, or even forget to make a claim at all – leaving employees out of pocket.

When using a company card, the transaction is or at least should be, business-related. But if the right documentation is missing, it’s no fun when the tax authorities come knocking.

Business travels abroad can also present challenges for expense management. Per diem allowances, local VAT, and currencies are all things that need to be accounted for and can complicate things. Having a clear company policy on how to approach foreign travel expenses is great, but that doesn’t necessarily make the process hassle-free.

Thankfully, there is an easier way.

How to make expenses easier

We live in a world where digital solutions are emerging for almost every imaginable problem. Business expenses are no exception. Take a smartphone camera and an intuitive app with payroll and bookkeeping integrations, and suddenly it’s possible to manage expenses in minutes or even seconds.

Our expense management platform uses automation to streamline the flow of recording expense transactions. For every new transaction, employees simply snap a photo of a receipt or fetch the digital receipt – and attach it to the expense. With a built-in OCR scanner, a photo becomes much more than just a digital image. Key data from a receipt is extracted and used to populate the claim itself. In one snap, everything from the amount to the type of purchase can be brought into the system.

Most employees use a card to make their expense purchases. Our platform can connect multiple cards to give employees a better expense experience.

The software also learns over time. It will make category suggestions based on the type of purchase. For example, it might identify a receipt for food and drink and suggest the category ‘entertainment’. Automated category mapping is an important feature for company bookkeepers because it helps to ensure that expenses are properly categorised in finance systems.

Expenses also get the right approval before they enter bookkeeping and payroll systems. The approver gets a pop-up notification, and the approval can be done in a single tap. It’s then forwarded to finance. Timely and accurate data ensures payroll and bookkeeping teams have continuous near real-time oversight of expenses. It also helps speed up reimbursements.

From an employee perspective, no matter what business expenses they incur, the fact is their employer owes them money, and they want it back as soon as possible. Integrations with leading accounting and payroll software helps ensure approved expense data flows quickly into the right systems – so it’s soon ready for reimbursement.

What’s Findity’s role in this?

Glad you asked! We’re specialists in expense management and deliver our white label tech to partners – helping them ease their customers' frustration with managing expenses.

If you’re keen on learning more about white label expense management, get in touch with us today.