Why Expense Process Improvement Boosts Productivity

If you're thinking about upgrading to a new expense management system, there are some obvious benefits that stand out: Better visibility into spend transactions, cost savings, and enhanced compliance, to name a few. Yet while these benefits are truly impactful, there are some subtler, more difficult to quantify advantages that should be accounted for, as well. Employee productivity is one such advantage.

This connection may not immediately jump out at you, but it becomes clear after the hidden costs of complex and manual processes are calculated. The longer a worker spends hunting down receipts, filling out expense reports, and waiting for approvals adds up quickly. It also takes away from the hours that could be spent on tasks that create more value for the organization.

If you look at this from the standpoint of a single person, the number of lost hours may not overwhelm you. Yet these small inefficiencies compound over time and scale with your workforce, creating a significant productivity and efficiency headwind that can impact operations, timelines, and client relationships.

To be competitive, you need to be agile and efficient, with a commitment to process improvement. Taking that approach to expense management can create competitive advantages that extend far beyond the finance department, as workers now spend time on strategic tasks and innovation instead of tedious manual admin work.

How Do We Create Expense Processes that Lead to Productivity?

Let's take a closer look at how a layered approach to expense management works and how the connections between employees, teams, and organizational workflows can turn expense management from a mere financial control operation to a productivity initiative.

Historically speaking, when individual employees travel for business, they face a gauntlet afterward: shuffling through a stack of receipts, categorizing expenses, filling out reports, and submitting their forms for approval. In other words, they are not advancing projects, speaking with clients, or completing strategic plans when they could be. These manual processes are also a net negative for the employee's mindset. They worry about losing receipts and missing submission deadlines or failing to comply with policies. They may also be frustrated by a longer reimbursement cycle. All of these concerns can create a cognitive load that detracts from their core responsibilities.

Teams, too, can suffer from inefficient expense processes that hurt productivity and delay timelines. Projects can come in behind schedule and workers who are typically managing key client relationships often get bogged down while navigating expense reporting, something that can sour clients and hurt business outcomes.

Collaboration can also suffer if you have to deal with opaque or over-complicated expense processes. If you have a joint project, managing shared expenses, reconciling costs, or tracking your budget allocations across different departments can lead to slower decision-making if these processes are all highly manual.

Approval workflows also take away the attention of managers who must manually review and approve routine expenses. This is essentially busy work, and it prevents them from higher-value projects.

Finally, if we look at the organization as a whole, inefficient expense processes often create operational bottlenecks that can impede numerous core business functions. If you delay your expense reporting, this can impact your budget planning, inventory forecasting, and your cash flow management. If employees are consistently delaying expense submissions because the process is too complex, then you can't have real-time financial visibility.

How to Address These Drawbacks

Now that we've talked about how productivity suffers, let's walk through how you can turn things around. With process improvement and the right supporting technology, you can quickly reach new (and measurable) levels of productivity and efficiency that benefit everyone.

The easiest way to effectuate this change is to switch from the standard manual process to an automated system. Even better if it uses an AI-powered approach to dramatically reduce the amount of time employees and managers spend on expenses. Automated expense management solutions, such as ExpenseIt, enable workers to instantly capture their receipts via mobile device and automatically categorize them. This means they can save countless hours otherwise spent searching for documentation and hoping that all expenses are properly categorized.

The same holds true for the manual processes that govern data entry, which often are slow and invite errors. If expense data is automatically captured and validated instantly, rejected or incomplete submissions drop dramatically. Employees also deal with a lesser cognitive load and less worry when the process is fast and built to minimize errors, something that helps with morale and retention.

Concur solutions also enable automated approval workflows and intelligent enforcement of policies. Now, admins no longer are mired in routine paperwork and oversight and can instead focus on strategic leadership. As the process becomes faster and more streamlined, real-time visibility now enables far more effective budgeting, forecasting, and decisions about how to allocate resources. Instant access to expense data unlocks analytics that enable deeply informed decisions about how to optimize organizational travel and make budgets go farther.

Streamlining and simplifying your expense processes with the right technology can also lower friction and accelerate your workflows. Expense data now flows directly into your accounting systems, speeding up financial reporting while also increasing accuracy. Such integrations can make financial planning more agile, while the real-time nature of automated expense management platforms make business operations more responsive. Instead of waiting for monthly reports, managers can make quick decisions to optimize travel approvals, project budgets and more.

Finally, organizations that invest in advanced expense management send a signal about their commitment to organizational efficiency. When employees see for themselves the benefits of automation, they respond favorably, which creates momentum for similar process improvements in other business areas. Soon the organization is catalyzing transformative changes, one department at a time.

The Takeaway

Investing in an advanced, AI-powered expense management solution can be a real driver of both productivity and process improvement, while also making expense processes far less onerous for workers and managers. With their time freed up, they can focus on more meaningful, value-creating tasks.

If you'd like to hear more about how simplified expense management can enhance employee experience and satisfaction we encourage you to check out this podcast.