Slow employee expense reimbursement isn’t just time-consuming but damaging to workplace relationships too. Therefore, if you’re not swiftly paying employees back for their out-of-pocket expenses, you’ll want to improve this process – and ASAP!
So, how do you speed up the reimbursement of your employees’ expenses? We’ve outlined everything you need to know to do just that.
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Encourage Employees to Submit Expenses on Time
While the responsibility largely lies with the finance team to process employee expenses quickly, it’s also vital that employees fulfil their role. After all, if employees are taking weeks, or even months to submit their expense or mileage reports, this creates a bottleneck in the reimbursement process.
Encourage your workers to file their expenses quickly by enforcing a deadline. Explain that it’s to help them stay on top of this responsibility and be sure to give them enough time to get the task done.
As soon as possible is desired, but a more specific deadline might be no later than five business days after the end of the month, for example.
Have a Clear Expense Policy in Place
It’s also important for you to make the employee expense reimbursement process as easy as you can for your staff. Doing so will ensure they don’t run into any difficulties that may delay the submission of their expense reports.
The best way to do this is through having a clear expense policy in place for out-off pocket and/or travel and mileage expenses. Within this policy, provide easy-to-understand guidelines on:
Eligible expenses for reimbursements (i.e., category and amount)
Submission deadlines
Process for requesting reimbursements
Required expense details (i.e., the date of the transaction, merchant name, amount spent to be reimbursed, and a comprehensive description of the transaction)
Timeline for payment
Consequences of late expense submissions (i.e., delayed reimbursement or tax obligations)
Use an Expense Management Software
The quickest and easiest way to speed up employee expense reimbursement is through using expense management software. Not only does this software allow employees to submit expense reports in real-time, thus preventing delays, but it also contains features such as automatic expense policy enforcement.
ExpenseIn, for example, replaces painstaking spreadsheets with the convenience and accessibility of an app. It provides a real-time receipt scanning function that extracts all of the relevant information from receipts automatically, saving manual data extraction. It also alerts employees to common expense issues before submission, allowing them to fix these immediately and speed up approval.
Automatic mileage calculations, approval notifications, expense reports, automated email reminders, and seamless integration with accounting software are some of the additional features that boost expense reimbursement timelines.
Put an End to Slow Employee Expense Reimbursement with ExpenseIn
Don’t risk frustrated employees, a time-poor finance department, or the other liabilities that come with slow expense reimbursement. Through taking advantage of employee expense management software, you too can speed up your employee expense reimbursement process.
