When travelling for work, one thing is common across all industries and employees, no matter where they're based. We love our coffee and tea. It's inexpensive, and sometimes simply necessary to get the job done.
Filing and reconciling employee expenses has always been time-consuming. The word expense immediately draws negative feelings. One reason, because yes, it essentially means cost. But, what if we shifted that story - and used it as a way to visualise new ways to save?
But what if we told you that if you had 100 employees travelling just once per year, expensing just one cup of joe, it would cost your business £45,120 a year. Yes, you read that right. Here's how:
Let's compare two companies, Company A, which manages expenses in the traditional way, which looks something like this:
Traditional expense systems were created with two main goals. First, to reduce expense fraud amongst employees. Second, to have complete control over all employee spending. The goals make sense, but in the process, we ended up costing ourselves time and money.
How was this calculated?
- It takes 15 minutes for an employee to complete an expense report
- 5 minutes for a manager to review
- 10 minutes for a finance team member to review, reimburse, and reconcile
- 1 in 5 expense reports contain an error and each error takes 18 minutes to correct
- The average expense report processing cost is £30.10
- An individual produce license for expense management software is £15.00 per user
Sources: Aberdeen Group, Concur, and the Global Business Travel Association
To see the full source data and methodology, and calculate your exact expense management platform costs, download our Expense Management Calculator.
So...is there a solution?
So far we’ve established that the traditional way of managing workforce travel expenses costs your business money and employees a whole lot of time. You're not alone if you're reading this in shock. 55% of CFO's also wanted to automate expense management practices. Let's look at the same example, but with Company B that uses a modern expense management system.
Modern expense management platforms like RoomexPay have extremely low set-up costs, create control over all spend, while providing flexibility on projects and to employees, reducing time spent on reimbursement when it's completely eliminated. Besides saving time and money, here are some benefits to using a modern expense management system:
Overhauling traditional expense management practices have immediate positive impacts on your business. From cutting costs and reducing fraud to easing pain for employees, managers and the finance team - modern, proactive expense management systems have exponential benefits.
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Here at Roomex, we offer an end to end expense management solution called RoomexPay.
- RoomexPay offers visibility and control to finance teams when all company spend can be monitored and analysed in real-time
- Prepaid company cards with customisable limits and top up schedules
- No more paperwork, false claims, or manual errors
- Employees will never be left out of pocket with prepaid company cards
- Expenses are claimed in seconds when employees can simply snap a picture and categorise their expense on their mobile phones
- Best in class account management to guide you through best practices and the drafting of an expense policy
Learn more about how RoomexPay can help transform your expense management system and save your business time and money by getting in touch with our team here.
