While packing for your morning flight out of Austin, you triple-check your briefcase for the receipts you’ve collected while visiting a client. This time, you hope, it won’t take quite so long to fill out your expense reports. One receipt turns out to be a formidable bill from the first night — a business dinner with your team of four, plus eight guests. Or was it nine guests? The week-old receipt already seems faded and hard to read.
Larger groups present unique challenges when it comes to expense management, whether your company is sending representatives to a trade show or housing a team in a hotel during a week-long software installation. The following tips will make it easier to follow the company’s expense policy while on the road, ensuring simple and efficient reimbursement.
- Automate your process. The foundation of good travel expense management is user-friendly online expense report software. When you enter a travel expense, the software analyzes a variety of criteria to ensure the expense follows your company’s policies. Any problematic items are flagged for review and resolution. Such systems may support efficiency by integrating credit cards and receipt images.
- Make expense reporting mobile. When you’re on the road, mobile web apps for expenses make it easy to stay current by entering expenses on a smartphone or tablet rather than digging through crumpled receipts at the end of a business trip. Entering expenses as you go also means faster reimbursements for you and the company.
- Use corporate credit cards for convenience. When integrated with your expense management software, corporate cards help you and other frequent travelers avoid tedious data entry by automatically downloading expenses. Among the benefits to your company are reduced risk of falsified receipts and lower costs for processing expense reports.
Combining the use of a corporate card with automated, mobile expense reporting makes it easier for you and your employees to abide by company expense policies.
What tips do you have for making travel expense management easier for larger groups? Let us know in the comments section below!
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Our choice of Chrome River EXPENSE was made in part due to the very user-friendly interface, easy configurability, and the clear commitment to impactful customer service – all aspects in which Chrome River was the clear winner. While Chrome River is not as large as some of the other vendors we considered, we found that to be a benefit and our due diligence showed that it could support us as well as any large players in the space, along with a personalized level of customer care.
We are excited to be able to enforce much more stringent compliance to our expense guidelines and significantly enhance our expense reporting and analytics. By automating these processes, we will be able to free up AP time formerly spent on manual administrative tasks, and enhance the role by being much more strategic.