Expense Report Management is the process of managing the entire procedure of filling, submitting, approval, reimbursement and analysis of travel-related expenses of employees. Thus, expense report management includes four activities namely reporting, reimbursement, compliance and analysis. Reporting includes the process of preparing the expense report form, its submission to the concerned approval authority and obtaining all the management approvals for claiming reimbursement. Generally, most companies provide an online facility to their employees for completing the expense report form. Once the report is forwarded to the approval department, it will be reviewed as per the travel policies of the organization. Then the report is forwarded to the finance department for the grant of funds for reimbursement. The next activity in the expense report management is payment of expenses by the payroll department. The reimbursement amount could be electronically transferred by the company to the corporate bank account of the employee. Afterwards, the payroll department scans the original receipts submitted by the employee to produce them during audit time. Then, the immediate activity of analysis of the expenses follows. The finance department, together with other departments, sort out the expenses of employees during their visits to identify the wasteful practices involved. Accordingly, they will improve their negotiations with airline companies, hotels, road transport agencies, etc. The foundation of the expense report management system of an organization is strict insistence on the timely, accurate and honest submission of expense reports. Moreover, web-based automated expense report management tools quicken the filing, approval and reimbursement processes of companies, without resulting in any errors and chaos. The software tools like Ceridian Expense Manager and Expense Management Automation (EMA) allow the companies to review and analyze the visit expenses of the employees. They will enable the companies to trim their costs involved in expense report filing, approval and compliance activities of the expense report management and also deliver the rapid reimbursements to the employees. Even employees find it very useful to complete online report forms provided by these software tools. Ceridian expense manager also converts multiple currencies with respect to the payments to international travelers. Through expense report management software, companies can visualize the wasteful expenses involved so that they can make some Memorandums of Understanding with airline companies, hotels, travel agencies etc to frame a better travel policy that results in reducing costs. |
