One of the key problems with traveling is that it calls for a lot of expenditures to be made in a short period of time, and these expenditures serve many different purposes. Transportation to and from a destination is costly, food for employees is a necessity, entertainment expenses may be necessary in order to secure a good relationship with clients, and then there are “miscellaneous” expenses for everything from shoe shine to the mouthwash that forgot to be packed, but is nevertheless an important component of a successful business meeting.

All of this expenditure needs to be accounted for, and in theory, the expense report is supposed to be the tool that accountants and other finance staff in a company use in order to ensure that everyone sees and knows how money is being spent when employees work abroad.

Automation Ensures Accuracy

With traditional expense report methods, accounting and finance staff can only get access to these numbers once an expense report has been filed. If employees submit these reports late—which can happen for any number of perfectly legitimate reasons, especially if they have a lot of work waiting for them upon their return—things fall by the wayside. If receipts are missing, there are “holes” in the report, and if you need to get a “big picture” look at how your travel expenses are translating into successful business ventures, it takes a long time to retrieve that data and collate into a form you can use.

With automated expense report software like ExpensePoint, all of these tasks are made faster, easier and more efficient. Financial activity can be monitored even while the trip is in progress, as expense reports are made “on the road” not after the trip is over. This also means that compliance is easier to track, since the software can automatically flag and notify any payments that are non-compliant.

Because all the financial activity is centrally available online in various formats, “top level” data is much easier to retrieve, so you can make a direct, side-by-side comparison of the travel spending of one employee versus another. You can even look at your most successful business trips or your most unproductive ones, and see where and how the spending occurred in these trips to see if a correlation exists.

And because these reports are filed digitally and online, the information only needs to be entered and then verified once. With a manual expense report system, once an employee fills a form, a finance staff member needs to re-enter that data into another program. With an automated expense report software solution, once an employee makes a report, it can be checked and verified online, with no redundant, repeat activity to ensure the same information already filled out has been transferred to another program or database.

Automated expense report software means you and your accounting and finance staff have much more accessible, reliable and accurate data on how expense transactions occur during travel. And that means you’ll have an easier time making your financial decisions because you good information to work with.