In most companies, the employee expense reimbursement process works independently of wage disbursement. Salary is debited to account monthly like clockwork but when it comes to travel expense reimbursement, there can be many lapses in both process and time taken to settle claims. Each receipt/bill/expenditure has to be penned down with corresponding dates and if all is approved, the amount due gets reimbursed eventually, usually in a decentralized, unstructured manner. As an employee, it can be a pain to actually put together the full account of business travel expenses without a centralized place where it can be managed. It should be borne in mind that it is equally tedious for the employer/management to check and authenticate the reimbursement, resulting in long gaps in approval and actual reimbursement. This often leads to rifts in employer-employee relations. Often, it is not the fault of any given person but the process itself, or unique situations that arise. Let us further understand the challenges faced and ways in which these can be tackled for better business travel expense management.
Challenges faced by employees:
- Reduced personal cash flow. Every individual meticulously plans monthly expenditure to break even or save a small portion from the salary but sudden business travel expenses put strains on cash flow. Especially if expenses are not reimbursed within a month, which seldom happens.
- Employee may not be willing or may hesitate to travel for business purposes. This affects employee productivity as he/she won’t be in a position to confidently incur person expenses fearing delays in reimbursement.
- Employee may even leave because of untimely settlements. An opaque expense policy can make employee retention difficult.
- Usage of manual systems or old software solutions to record, monitor and estimate business travel expenses is still prevalent in many companies. These dated methods are time-consuming as well as inaccurate, which leads to mismanagement of large business travel expense, thus hampering company growth. Even employees delay in filing travel expense reports due to tedious filing procedures which will further give way to errors (due to memory gaps). To combat this, business expense software solutions with real-time tracking (through desktop or mobile phones) like Zento could be used to systematically input accurate data quickly for ease of processing.
- Cost of processing reimbursement of business travel expense is usually far greater than it should be, putting a dent in company capital which can be eliminated.
- Many companies have opaque travel expense policies which leave employees confused and hesitant. This could lead to confusion about acceptable payments leaving scope for errors in judgement. This will further increase the workload of management to sort out discrepancies in reports.
We’ve devised Zento to eliminate problems like these. Zento is a one stop solution to all your problems related to business and travel expense management. Zento gives you these benefits:
- faster reimbursement
- quicker claim settlement
- less manpower and time required for authentication
- effective use of technology to simplify expense report generation
- centralized, tiered, rule-based expense management information and policies
A travel expense management software system simplifies necessary data to help them make a suitable decision regarding acceptable expenses, reducing company workload involved in sorting travel expenses. Zento strives to consolidate, automate and streamline your company’s business expense management process. And the best part is it can be done in real-time from your desktop as well as your mobile.
