What is employee expense management? 

Managing employee expenses can be complicated, tedious and inefficient, taking your time away from running your business. The good news is that by putting in the right foundations, you can create an expense process that runs smoothly and frees up your time for better things. 

The best place to start when reviewing your expenses process is to take a look at your expenses policy. Your policy should include how employees can make a claim, what can be reimbursed and what their spending limits are. As these guidelines can vary over time it’s worth keeping the policy somewhere that is easily accessible for example via Google Docs or Notion.

This isn’t a one-kind-fits-all thing, there are different levels of expense reimbursements that your agency may offer, and what you offer will depend on your employee’s role and needs as well as your company budget. 

Once you’ve got your expenses policy straight, then it’s time to look at the tools you can use to streamline the expenses process. You might even decide that you don’t want your employees to be out of pocket when they incur expenses, so may consider setting up a prepaid card. 

Expense reporting 

Imagine getting sent through some receipts to reimburse that only show the date and the amount, now you are left having to spend more time going back and forth to find out what these were for. To be able to keep good records of expenses your employees should have a clear process of what is needed from them, collecting and maintaining all relevant receipts, and ensuring they provide some contextual information of these expenses all aid the efficiency of the process whether these are then dealt with manually or through expense management software. 

Manual reporting

Manual reporting was the traditional method of tracking and managing employee expenses, either by paper forms or manually entering data into spreadsheets. It can work for small companies with minimal expense activity but can quickly become time-consuming as your agency grows. 

You’d be tasked with collecting, reviewing and processing numerous receipts handed to you from your employees and once these have been organised, looked through and approved you’d still need to process the expense claim. 

These methods are not only time-consuming but prone to human errors, either incorrect data entry or duplicate submissions. These aren’t the only drawbacks to manual processing, it could cause delays in reimbursement which would cause frustration amongst your employees. 

If you’re worried about moving away from the manual approach to a tech approach, fear not, the software we talk about below is designed to be user-friendly and has built-in around-the-clock support. 

Automated Reporting

You can automate your whole expense claim process, by utilising expense management software. This means you can quickly improve workflow and leave paperwork, spreadsheets and extensive admin behind, and look forward to user-friendly applications and real-time data processing! 

Leaving the software to do the dirty work and improving accuracy and minimising human errors is just a couple of the ways these software can improve the efficiency of your agency’s employee expense claims.

There are many different software available so it is important to find the one that suits your agency’s needs. For example, it may be useful for you to have software that can create customisable reports so you can see where the majority of employee expenses are coming from, or so you can compare employee spending and show areas for cost savings. Or it may be important to you that you can access this software from anywhere so software that works well on your mobile devices may be something you prioritise. 

Dext is a great example of an expense management app, it’s user-friendly appearance makes uploading and organising your expenses a walk in the park. As well as being able to sync to multiple major accounting software such as Xero, Sage and Quickbooks it easily converts receipts into digital text. After just taking a picture of the receipt Dext can then analyse the data and have this sorted by tax, supplier and expense category, and even auto-publish to your accounting software. 

Its effortless Expense Claims Tool provides an easy way to create and complete employee expense claims. Once set up for your employee, Dext will routinely create expense claims for specific users, and this can be altered to what best suits your agency, whether it be every week, fortnight or month. This means any expenses an employee submits, Dext will automatically add this to their Expense Claim for that period. You can then appoint specific team members to see and approve these employee expense claims. 

Prepaid cards for employees

At a glance, prepaid cards for your employees are exactly the same as any other card, but beneath the surface they offer much more, saving time on your agency’s finance admin by eliminating reimbursements and streamlining company employee spending. 

These kinds of cards are not connected to your agency’s main bank account, instead, you are in control of your employee expenses by setting a predetermined amount on each employee’s card and enforcing rules on who can spend company money, how much they can spend and on what. 

Soldo is a great option for this and offers prepaid cards for employees that integrate with your accounting software, so you can track, manage and report on employee expenses. The funds sent to these employee cards are customisable along with the expense types that they can use the card for and also whether the funds are automatically replenished as the start of a new period. 

Used together with Soldo’s mobile expense app all the data is compiled in one place meaning you can monitor transactions in real time making it easier to manage budgets be it for a certain time period or for a specific project. 

Your next step with employee expense management 

After reading through the different kinds of employee expense management, you will hopefully feel more confident and know not to be hesitant in taking the leap to a more automated approach, improving productivity, saving costs, compliance and fraud prevention are only a few positives this move can make for your agency.

Get in touch if you would like our support in streamlining your expense claim process.