The concept of the expense report is, for many companies, a bit like eating your vegetables. It’s something that everyone acknowledges is a good thing, even a necessary thing for the continued health of a company. But no one really wants to spend a lot of time and energy on it, especially when the understandable main focus of a company should be on making money by performing that company’s specialty.

Because of this, it’s easy to see how a lot of companies can fall behind on modern techniques for expense reporting. This is especially true—and understandable—for small business that enjoy great success and then grow bigger. In the beginning, if you’re just in business for yourself, it’s easy to forgo the need for an elaborate expense report system. At this early stage in a business life, there’s simply no need to track the expenditure of only one person, or even two or three. A company is small enough at this stage that the requirements for good expense reporting are minimal.

All of this changes with success.

More Success=More Challenge

When you’re working on your own or with a very small team in the beginnings of a small business, you’re probably not traveling much. So, when you do, your expenses are small, easily tracked, and, with such a small number of staff, you may actually be better off using old fashioned paper forms and storing them in your archives for later reference.
As your business grows and you add on more employees, this becomes problematic for a great number of reasons.

The first is that, quite simply, in the 21st century, a traditional paper form filling, processing and filing system is slow, inefficient and, in the long run, expensive. Printing forms costs money, especially when multiple copies are required. Money is also expended in the amount of time required for people to fill forms, for the relevant financial staff to track down those forms and process them, for management to look over those processed forms and approve them, and for reimbursement to occur.

Then, after all that time and expense, these paper forms need to be filed away in some kind of storage area or facility in order to ensure that accurate financial records are maintained. All of this is important, but all of it is also time intensive, labor intensive, and costly.

Software Streamlines Your Work

When you get to this level, expense report software is a much more efficient and cost effective choice to implement. Modern expense report software even stores all the information online, completely rendering the need for storage areas or facilities obsolete, as records can be retrieved online for viewing at any time from any location, and printed on demand if there’s a requirement for a hard copy.

With good software, like ExpensePoint, you can finally abandon older, less efficient means of keeping track of travel expenses, and take advantage of a fast, convenient, digital system that goes wherever you do.