Business travel is not cheap. Between ever-increasing airfares, unpredictable hotel rates, and business meals, the cost for a single business trip can quickly add up to half your employee’s monthly take home pay. According to a recent Wakefield Research study commissioned by TriNet, three out of five employees in the study had problems paying personal bills while waiting for their employers to reimburse business expenses.

The same study showed that more than half of the employees chose not to participate in professional development opportunities because of their employers’ expense reimbursement processes.

Delayed or slow expense reimbursements are creating unhappy employees. The same study showed that 70 percent of employees would look for new jobs if expense reimbursements were constantly late. If your business has been using its employees as interest-free banks, it’s time to stop. But how do you speed up your reimbursement process?

Shorten Expense Reimbursement Times With Automation

Automated expense report software can help drastically shorten reimbursement times. With automated software, your employees don’t have to wait until they get back from their trip to seek reimbursement. Expenses can be recorded via mobile phones as soon as they are incurred and uploaded for approval. Employees also don’t have to waste time filling out manual paper expense reports.

Employees can also take pictures of their receipts and link them to expenses immediately, avoiding the time-consuming back-and-forth with accounting that results from a lost receipt.

Approvers can approve or decline expenses item-by-item as they are recorded rather than waiting for employees to submit a completed expense reports. By the time employees return from their trips, the reimbursement process is well underway.

Approvers can also access, review, and approve expenses from their mobile phones, so expense reports can continue to be processed even when approvers are not in the office.

If your business is constantly late on reimbursements, consider investing in automated expense report software to speed up your reimbursements, and improve employee morale.