The Connection Magazine A.I.M. Mutual Fall 2016 | Page 8

EXPENSE REPORT PROCESSING TOOL

WOULD YOUR COMPANY BENEFIT
FROM A TRAVEL AND ENTERTAINMENT
EXPENSE REPORT PROCESSING TOOL?
IT is important for every business to
continuously evaluate their business
practices to determine if there is a more
efficient way to operate. Often there are
processes in place that were the latest
(or the only) methods available at the
time they were implemented. But new
ideas and advances in technology provide
opportunities for improvement.
One of the many things technology
has made easier is the process by which
employees can submit requests and
receive reimbursements for business
expenses.
Not that long ago, it was standard
business
expense
reporting
for
employees to collect paper receipts,
tape them to a piece of paper, fill out
paperwork, and submit it all to the
accounts payable department. They
then had to wait while accounts payable
scanned the receipts, entered the
information into its accounting system,
and sent it to the proper manager or
supervisor for approval before payments
could actually be processed and checks
issued to employees.
There are a number of disadvantages
with this process, including the fact that
employees have no way of knowing at
what stage their submissions are in or
how long it will be before they actually
see their reimbursements. The process
could take up to a week, or even longer if
it’s stuck sitting on a supervisor’s desk,
waiting for approval until that person
FALL 2016

comes back from vacation or a business
trip.
Now there are several expense
report processing tools available on the
market that companies can implement
to enhance and speed up the process of
employee reimbursement submission
and payment. Using any one of these
systems, employees can simply take a
photo of the receipt and submit it for
payment right away. It goes straight to
the desktop of the appropriate person
for approval, and, if a specified amount
of time passes without any updates,
the information will automatically go to
the desktop of the next person in the
queue for approval. The company defines
the specified time limit, who is in the
approval queue, and the hierarchy within
the queue.
There are many benefits to such
a system, not least of which is that
employees no longer have to worry about
keeping tiny paper receipts. Instead,
they can just snap a photo of a receipt
right there at the restaurant, gas station,
or other location. It automatically gets
stored in the expense reporting system’s
cloud and submitted for approval.
Another advantage to having a cloudbased system is that all that accounting
information doesn’t take up space on
the employer’s server. And it saves a
company time and money because it
doesn’t have to worry about scanning
and processing the receipts and all the

resulting paperwork. The expense report
processing tool does it all for them.
Such systems can also assist
with monitoring employee business
expenses. If a submission is unusually
large, the system can prompt a note to
the employee or flag the expense so
the employee is aware that it’s larger
than normal. Employers can also set
up the expense reporting system so
that exceptionally large submissions
automatically get denied for approval
or require additional explanation. For
further analysis of expenses, these
systems provide users with the ability
to run reports on an individual employee
and company-wide basis.
With a good expense report processing
tool, employers are in complete control,
from start to finish, while simultaneously
gaining a significant reduction in the
time and energy spent managing this
time-consuming process.

Paul Kehoe is A.I.M. Mutual’s
vice president and treasurer.
He has been with the company
for more than ten years and
previously served as controller.
Glenn MacDonald is the director
of finance at A.I.M. Mutual
and has more than twentyfive years of experience in
the insurance industry.

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