Make sure employee expenses aren't paused during the holiday season

With the holiday season in full swing you might be forgiven for having more relaxing things on your mind. The long hot summers, sandy beaches and sangrias might be a temporary retreat, but your employees' expenses will still be waiting for you to process when you get back.

By automating your expense management process with Expenses, you will not be returning to an in-tray full of expense claims awaiting your action. For one thing, all claims are processed online removing the physical paper trail and secondly you can assign a colleague to approve claims on your behalf. This ensures that when you are on annual leave, away on a business trip or have to take time off through illness, expenses claims are not backlogged and employees do not have to be inconvenienced by having to wait to be reimbursed their business related expenses.

Making sure expense claims are reviewed and approved by line managers

Spending time out of the office generally means a full inbox, mountains of paperwork and a general office catch-up on return; approving expenses is just one more thing on a line mangers list of things to do. And this doesn't even begin to cover the frustrations of the claimants who have to wait for their expenses to be approved, and then sent to the accounts department for payment.

Through Expenses you can ensure claims can continue through the process:

Set up teams of approvers – when setting up employees, who will have the responsibility to approve business expense claims, on the system you can assign them to a team or group. This means that you can create an approval stage which is a group of people instead of one individual, enabling anyone within this team to approve the claim.

Skip this stage – if there are multiple approval stages to approve a claim you can opt to skip an approval stage.

Allocate to a colleague – if a line manager knows that they will be away from their job role the system can be set up to enable them to specify this period and have any actions they would normally be responsible for automatically assigned to an individual or group that has been nominated.

Report on claims needing approval – the system allows you to run a simple report to find any claims still needing to be approved. This then enables you to prompt the line manager(s) to approve the claim and send the claim through to the next step in the approval process; ensuring that all employees are repaid on time and preventing any upset.

Making sure expenses are reimbursed when a member of the finance team is out of the office

To ensure that all claims are checked, processed and then reimbursed, even when a member of the finance team is absent from the office, Expenses includes a ‘Sign Off Team Option’. This means that when a claimant submits an expense claim it does not go to an individual finance clerk but to a team within the finance department. Any member of that team can then approve the claim.

Once the claim reaches the signoff team, the claim will be visible in Check & Pay to all team members and will remain in this ‘holding state’ until a member of the team simply selects and allocates the claim to themselves for processing. The allocated claim will then be removed from the other team members’ action list.

Expenses makes the expense claim process as simple as 1-2-3!

To learn more about Expenses visit www.expenses-software.com or call 01522 881300