Streamline your claims process with clear policies, digital tools, and trend monitoring for faster results—discover how Summit's expense management can help.
Managing expense reimbursements can be a complex and lengthy task for businesses. Various expenditures must be tracked and reconciled, and company policies must be complied with while maintaining accurate records for financial reporting.
Overly complex, lengthy reporting processes can generate confusion and frustration among employees, leaving them unsure about eligible expenses. Payment delays can also harm their monthly cash flow.
Research by McKinsey & Company found that finance teams spend up to 30% of their time on manual, repetitive tasks, including data entry and approval workflows. Implement the following steps in your reimbursements claim process to avoid this and ensure a smoother, more efficient workflow and fewer headaches for employees and your finance team.
Our Top Tips for Faster Reimbursements
Establish Clear, Simple Expense Policies
A common claim process complaint from employees is the confusion over which expenses are eligible. They often lack a comprehensive understanding of the reporting process and how long it should take, making them anxious about submitting their receipts.
Establishing comprehensive expense policies that clearly outline the documentation required and what expenses are eligible for reimbursement is essential for addressing employee confusion. You must also ensure these policies align with industry standards and legal regulations. Expense limits, for example, will prevent employees from claiming a higher amount than the limit or overspending.
Employees must also know clear deadlines for submitting their expense reports to prevent processing delays and ensure expenses are accounted for in the correct financial period. Ensure that this policy is easily accessible to all employees. Simple access to more straightforward policies can result in your expense team receiving fewer non-compliant claims and carrying out fewer extensive reviews.
Simplify Receipt Management
Receipt management is essential for an effective expense reimbursement claim process. Employees must collect receipts and submit them as proof of business expenses using a paper system. Managing this can be cumbersome for your finance team and employees, who should focus on strategic business objectives. Moreover, paper receipts are often prone to misplacement or damage.
Expense management software can simplify receipt management. Digitising the process will give employees access to receipts from anywhere and allow them to upload them to the cloud with their phones. Your finance team will also be able to search for any receipt with a few clicks rather than sifting through a mountain of paper.
Monitor Expense Trends
It's easy to fall behind in monitoring claim process trends. Finance teams are busy year-round with various tasks. This means that keeping on top of trends can be difficult, particularly if they have to enter receipt details physically.
However, monitoring these trends is essential to ensure efficiency and cost control. Tracking spending patterns helps identify areas of overspending, detect potential fraud and policy violations before they escalate, and highlight opportunities for cost savings. Thanks to better visibility and control, you can reduce overall spending.
Spending analysis tools allow finance teams to aggregate and analyse data from multiple sources—such as travel bookings, invoices, and employee claims—into one centralised dashboard. These tools can help identify spending trends, compare travel expenses against industry standards, spot overspending, and conduct audit expense reports.
Summit's Employee Expense Management
Summit's Employee Expense Management incorporates the above tips into a centralised solution to help your finance team streamline the claim process. Your team can submit claims using their desktops or mobile apps, allowing seamless expense management anytime, anywhere.
- Streamlined Expense Management
With Summit, compliance with guardrails and workflows is ensured according to expense policies before disbursement. Employee Expense Management is a digital tool that provides real-time insights, so you won't have to worry about sorting through messy stacks of receipts. Employees scan their receipts before the transaction details are automatically captured and processed into expense reports.
- Centralised Expense Tracking
With our platform, you won't have to rely on multiple tools for expense tracking during the claims process. All non-payroll spending is centralised, and employees can instantly generate their digital expense reports. Summit can boost your claims process accuracy and efficiency with AI-powered smart scanning, auto-populating receipt details and simplifying reimbursement requests.
- Faster Processing
Advanced approval automation removes approval process bottlenecks by allowing you to route reimbursements to the correct approvers while flagging non-compliant claims. The system also delivers instant data-driven reports to facilitate strategic decisions.
- Flexible Pricing for Scalability
The unlimited user pricing allows you to add as many members as required without incurring additional fees. Instead, we charge you based on the number of transactions processed to ensure that you only pay for what you use. You can onboard all your employees to manage their expenses without worrying about high costs.
- Seamless Integration and Support
Our software will also seamlessly integrate with accounting systems like NetSuite and Xero, automatically syncing data and eliminating manual entry. We offer comprehensive support for implementing and training our clients on our software, with personalised onboarding sessions and dedicated customer support to maximise your organisation's benefits.
Please contact us if you want to talk to a team member, book a demo, or ask us any questions about Summit's Employee Expense Management.
