Expense Automation Finally Reaches The Cloud With Expensify!
Cloud accounting has revolutionised the financial sector, with some major players breaking through and creating real world solutions that just plain work for simplifying the accounting process.
Where most fall short is with expense reporting, because it’s like all the major platforms need integrated with add-ons/additional apps to complete the package.
Part of managing your business requires you or your finance department to stay on top of all the expenses. That’s a tedious and time consuming chore in itself.
Until you start with Expensify!
In our opinion, Expensify is revolutionising how expense reports are automated, created, shared and submitted.
What it does:
· Smart scan – Is great for filing away receipts
· Auto bank and credit card imports – This goes further to match the tags on your digital receipts to the corresponding bank or credit card transactions. If there’s no match from your bank or credit card data when you import it over, it’ll be created as a cash expense.
· Distance Tracking – This lets you/your staff insert mileage either as a total distance, or you can set it a policy level to cover the maximum allowance employees can claim as an expense, or use the standard mileage allowance. The choice is yours when you set it up.
Other options for tracking mileage is to use the GPS setting, which will also record the data of where you or your staff travelled to and from to warrant the expense, or users can input the odometer data to file mileage expenses.
All of that done via a mobile app!
Faster reimbursements to employees
If there’s one thing going to get on your staff’s nerves, it’s waiting too long to get paid back what they are owed. What Expensify have done is included an option to automatically reimburse staff based on amounts predetermined by you.
What you can do with this is set a maximum limit that you’re happy to automatically reimburse, provided that your policy has been met, which you can set to include a receipt, ensuring that the expense report submitted to you has the necessary attachments for you to attach to your own reports and reclaim the expenses through your business accounts.
The Real Benefits of Expensify is Simplifying the Workflow for Finance Departments
With any number of employees submitting receipts for expenses, it creates a monster workload to review expense reports and then account for them by filing in the appropriate categories. Then depending on your company policy, you may have chain of command where the reports need approved and then sent up the chain of command for final approval and payment processing to reimburse the expenses to employees.
The Expensify app has a user friendly interface so anyone within your company will be able to use it. Only those authorised can manage the workflow though.
You can use this to create policies at management level, which will then instruct users what they need to do before they are able to file their expense reports; no more back and forth with incomplete reports. If it’s not got the data you need, it can’t be submitted for approval.
You can require your staff to tag expenses to an appropriate category, such as travel, meals, accommodation, mileage or entertainment. For each expense filed, you’d be best to set the policy to only allow reports to be submitted with a receipt attached.
Employees will be able to submit their reports with the population of a few fields and attaching the receipt and then just clicking submit. When the report is submitted, it sends an email to whoever is set up to manage the expenses letting them know there’s a new expense report awaiting their review.
Depending on how your policies are set up, the person reviewing the expense report submission can approve and reimburse or they can forward it further up the chain of command for someone senior to authorise or deny it.
The workflow can be as simple as authorising one person to sign off on legitimate expenses, or it could be used at enterprise level, passing expense reports from department to department until it receives the final seal of approval.
Payments can be reimbursed automatically and you can set filters to only pay amounts under the value you specify, ensuring that by enabling auto reimbursement that you aren’t going to run into cash flow problems.
Expensify uses the slogan, “expense reports that doesn’t suck” and it’s actually true of the product they have. What can suck about getting your staff more motivated by giving them what their owed faster and thereby never leaving them out of pocket for longer than necessary?
Besides, your finance people need this because it’s automation of a tedious task and will work to increase productivity and boost staff motivation.
When there’s something you can automate, that’s what to do. Now you can automate your expense report creation, submissions and automate the reimbursements of legitimate business expenses to your employees, whilst simultaneously ensuring that you have all the required information for your own accounting records.
We think it’s neat!
