By Steve Mallaby, CEO of Innervation Rewards & SlipMate
After a challenging two years marked by successive lockdowns and economic pressure, it would seem there is finally some positive light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.
In 2022, we seem to be moving back into some form of normal. For many of the struggling South African businesses and their finance teams, this good news could not have come at a better time.
Since the start of the first lockdown, companies have had to scramble to implement new tools, technologies, policies, and processes to keep their business running as smoothly as possible.
For finance teams, the past two years have been particularly tough as they tried to manage constrained budgets at a time of unprecedented disruption and uncertainty.
In 2022, if you’re not optimising your expense management and gaining full visibility over employee spend, you run the risk of burning through precious financial resources.
Companies should utilise the support of technology tools that can bring greater efficiency and transparency to their expense management efforts, improve their employee experience, and automate manual approval and reimbursement processes.
Here are four tips to guide your expense management efforts in the year ahead:
Tip #1: Make it easy to capture and submit expenses
Expecting employees to undergo time-consuming manual expense claim processes can hamper productivity and lead to a negative employee experience.
Ideally, every business wants its employees to work to their strengths and spend their time on activities that are of high value to the business. Submitting expense claims usually does not rank highly on most employees’ list of priorities.
Take away the pain by using a tool that makes it quick and easy to submit expense claims.
Choose an expense management solution that offers a smartphone app to empower employees to easily submit their claims in real-time, no matter where they are. Also look for optical character recognition capabilities (OCR) to ensure accurate capturing of expense claims, and forget the worry of lost receipts.
Tip #2: Automate the expense claim process where you can
The last thing you want is for your finance teams to be wading through mountains of paper receipts and manually capturing employee spend on spreadsheets. Employees may also lose or misplace receipts in between the time they incur the expense and when they need to submit their claim.
Using a tool that offers automated receipt filing ensures your business keeps track of all receipt images. Look for a tool that offers cloud storage so your finance team can easily access the information – whether they are working at the office or remotely.
This also makes it easier to meet compliance requirements and reduces overall cash flow risks.
Also look for an easy way to reconcile and manage expense claims and quickly reimburse employees. SlipMate’s card, for example, gives HR teams a quick and direct reimbursement mechanism with convenient top-up option to ensure employees have immediate access to their funds.
Tip #3: Clearly define (and enforce) expense claim policies
Every company needs clearly defined expense claim policies to ensure there is no doubt – or later unhappiness – about the types of expenses employees claim.
Effective expense management solutions should allow companies to allocate additional controls – for example to HR and finance teams – that enable them to approve or reject expense claims in real-time.
Companies can use this functionality to closely control expense claims and maintain high levels of compliance to company-wide expense claim policies, saving the company money and eliminating time wasted by employees waiting on expense claim approvals.
Tip #4: Use data to improve financial decision-making
In the world of business, you simply can’t manage what you can’t measure. And if you’re still relying on outdated manual or paper-based processes, chances are you lack visibility into your company’s overall expense claims and reimbursement processes.
Finance teams require intelligent expense management tools that bring real-time visibility and insights into expense claims and reimbursements.
Use a tool that empowers finance teams with a dashboard that shows real-time analytics and the ability to track claims and payouts without having to wade through mountains of paperwork or unwieldy spreadsheets.
