- Replacing costly manual processes with expense report automation can be easy when you focus on some key steps and best practices.
- Identifying pain points and policy gaps can ensure you choose a solution that helps solve your biggest challenges.
- Supporting success launch relies on a system that makes it simple to implement, configure expense automation, and onboard employees.
How to automate expense report tracking
Inefficient manual processes for expense tracking and reconciliation eat up time and money that your employees and finance team could be using to better advantage. As your company considers automated expense reporting, what are the right steps and best practices?
In helping many clients solve this challenge, I’ve seen that success typically involves the following four steps:
Step 1: Assess your expense tracking challenges and needs
Busy companies should not just grab the first solution that mentions expense report automation. You want to first clarify the problems you need to solve, so you can find a solution that really fits your business.
What are your pain points? Are employees frustrated and wasting productivity having to create manual expense reports and wait for reimbursements? Is reporting prone to errors from rekeying data or transcribing receipts? When you consider that manual reconciliation could be costing you up to $110 for each report – expense automation may be pivotal to your sustainability.
Also look at your expense policies for business travel, procurement, employee stipends and so on. What must be updated or added? The goal is to establish better guardrails for company spending, support faster reconciliation, and make it easy for employees to understand what’s expected of them.
Step 2: Choose the right solution for expense automation
As you consider solutions for automated expense reporting, here’s a tip from our clients. Simplicity and efficiency are key. That’s why they value having an SVB commercial card that includes a robust spend management platform. The system makes it easy to automate policy enforcement, expense capture and receipt handling, approvals, and syncing card data to your accounting ledger.
The right solution should also enable you to get up and running quickly. It should provide clear, simple steps for setup in minutes and helpful training guides for key features. If you need it, there should be expert support for more complex tasks like migrating data from a previous system to the new platform.
Step 3: Configure the spend management platform to your needs
Next, you’ll want to tailor expense automation controls to your specific needs and spend policies. For example, can you choose from a range of built-in business rules to assign users for automated approval routing, or dictate when receipts are required for expenses?
You may also want to create custom expense categories, such as using your own terminology to refer to certain types of spend. It helps you auto-categorize expenses and makes it easier for employees to code transactions correctly. And with easy API integration, you can automatically stream expense data to your ERP or accounting software.
Step 4: Onboard employees for expense report automation
When you’re ready to roll out a new solution, you want it to be quick and easy to onboard employee cardholders. With the right platform, it can be as simple as sending an email with links to helpful resources and installing the platform’s AI-powered mobile app for submitting expenses.
Choosing an expense tracking and management solution that can grow with your business enables you to optimize over time as your workforce and spending scale up. SVB commercial card programs are tailored for every stage of growth, backed by our unique expertise in helping innovation economy companies succeed.