The time employees spend filling out expense reports, manual entry errors, regular fraud… these are all hidden costs, and they can be high. But companies can rein in these costs with minimal effort. We focus on the hidden costs of inefficient expense report management and present solutions that can be implemented immediately.
A waste of time for employees, a significant shortfall in productivity
For employees
Filing expense reports is a tedious and time-consuming task that takes at least one hour per month, per employee. Multiplied by the number of employees in your company, this time diverted from tasks with real added value represents a considerable loss of earnings. Employees are investing their time in an automatable administrative formality, individual skills are not valued.
Reinvesting these lost hours in productive activities–selling your solutions, products, and services–is a given…
For managers
We see the same problem on the manager’s side. Individually and manually validating each expense on each expense report, verifying supporting documents, and physically transmitting expense claims to the next level for approval takes up a considerable amount of time. And the manager loses even more time managing expense reports when the amount of the expense exceeds a specific threshold, requiring a separate approval process.
The manager’s working hours are far from optimized…
For administrative/accounting staff
Checking the expense amount including and excluding VAT and verifying VAT, finding the right receipt from the stack of stapled receipts, checking it complies with the firm’s expense policy… these tasks are essential for the proper management of expense reports. However, manually processing them on a case-by-case basis represents long working hours for the administrative/accounting department.
An additional hidden cost that must be recognized…
For the finance department
Once again, considerable time is spent managing expense reports. In this case, it is a question of entering each expense into the IT tool, allocating it to the cost centers concerned, and generating the SEPA file, without forgetting to archive the receipts correctly in order to find them quickly if there is a tax or social security audit, after having made a copy of printed receipts that will be erased in six months time.
All of these wasted hours would undoubtedly be more constructive if they were used for a business objective.
Expense reports: “negligence” that can be costly
Companies are confronted with two types of negligence:
- Oversights–failure to submit receipts for expenses–and intentional or unintentional errors when entering the expense.
- Intentional fraud: submitting expenses incurred on weekends or during time off, exceeding authorized expense limits, multiple use of a single ticket, etc.
In any case, expense claim fraud is expensive: averaging €747 per employee per year.
Visible costs vs. global approach
Naturally, the company focuses on visible costs–train or plane tickets, hotel bills, etc. In reality, savings stem from optimizing the overall expense management process.
Adopting a global approach implies analyzing the relevance of the expenses incurred. This step highlights excesses and abuses, and pointless or inappropriate spending. The analysis can also identify the company’s recurring suppliers, with whom you could consider negotiating prices to reduce costs. Using this analytical approach requires a powerful tool equipped with AI, for fast and reliable results.
Expense report management software, the solution to put an end to hidden costs
Wasting time, the risk of fraud, the lack of a global approach: with manual expense report management, hidden costs weigh heavily on the company’s finances. This loss of profit is all the more damaging given that a simple and cost-effective solution can put an end to these problems.
N2F is an innovative software solution for expense report management designed to save precious time for all employees at all stages of expense report processing. The result: 75% of time saved at the administrative level, between 10 and 60 minutes saved per employee and per expense report. All of your employees are re-mobilized on high value-added assignments for the company. Automate low value-added expense report management tasks, reduce the risk of data entry errors to zero, accelerate and protect processes thanks to exclusive functionalities… you win on all levels. You should explore this solution without delay, especially given the ROI obtained in less than one year, or even six months for many customers. By adopting N2F and moving to a paperless system, you are also choosing an environmentally responsible approach. Get your demo here.
