Top 5 Ways to Manage Employee Expenses

The management of Employee Expenses has become one of the top corporate governance items in the wake of the many scandals making headline news.

Recent legislation focuses on what employees spend and why, so keeping clear, accurate and detailed records plays a critical part in order to handle any future audit of compliance or taxation authorities successfully.

With these reasons in mind, choosing an expense management system becomes important to ensure that the policies and record keeping are well managed. Here are the Top 5 most useful ways a company can manage employee expenses, based on feedback from companies using Systems@work.

1. Set proper workflow rules

It is important to make sure that expense claims are routed properly based on e.g. type, project and value. Set-up your system business rules matrix such that claims will be routed / alerted to the appropriate managers.

For example, the claims are first routed to a Line Manager, but where the claims are over $1,000 they are also routed to the Finance Director and ones over $5,000 are routed to the CEO.

2. Policy enforcement

Typically after submission, employees wait too long for someone to approve their claims. This is not an efficient way to manage claims.

So here’s a better solution. Configure your Expense Management software to prohibit employee’s claims which are clearly in breach of company policies and give warnings for e.g. client Entertainment expenses over $100 per head.

3. Capture all the data

In manual systems, employees often face the problem of losing receipts and lacking information to prove the claim validity.  This will not happen with automated Expense Management solutions. A good example of this is keeping details of reasons and the nature of the expense and specific information relating to the clients role.

4. Publish the data

By showing employees in detail what they actually spend categorised by client, project, trip, etc., can have a significant impact on them in terms of spending behaviour and sometimes decreases excessive spending. Make it transparent, available to everyone in detail and in summary for specific employees as well as groups / departments and at organizational level.

5. Keep the forms simple

Keep the forms simple with only the minimum number of fields required, and instead use back-end references such as Account and Department code to augment the claim.

We’ve shared with you the Top 5 ways Systems@Work customer‘s manage their Employee Expenses. Which ways are you trying to manage your own company’s expenses? Comment below and share with us your ideas how to manage employee expenses.

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