Bad expense habits and how to avoid them

Managing expenses can sometimes feel a bit like wrestling an octopus. You get one part under control and something else starts to wriggle.

One thing is certain, many businesses have expense management processes which are out of date and not fit for purpose. They are paper based, high on manual intervention, and often have complex and unnecessary layers of bureaucracy.

In many ways, the typical expense management process is a bad habit that most organisations need to lose. And like all bad habits, it takes a degree of determination and commitment to make a change.

So, let’s recognise some of the key issues. 

Whilst many parts of your organisation may be digitised, expense management can often seem archaic.

It often relies on asking your employees to pay for items or services with their own money, hang on to paper receipts, fill out a manual claim form, and then wait to be repaid. 

If this all sounds clunky and perhaps a little bit unfair to your employee, that's probably because it is. 

Does it sound like a good habit to have? Probably not.

Does it sound like a habit that causes your employees frustration and stress? Almost certainly.

So, what to do about this bad habit?

Well, most of the problem stems from a poor process, and your employees’ response to that process.

We know that employees lose their receipts or forget to submit their claims.

Add into this the human error issues caused by expense spreadsheets, and it’s clear that this bad habit needs to be resolved.

How can technology help to resolve bad habits with expenses?

Technology can be a real enabler in empowering your employees to help manage business expenses. 

For example, Expend’s employee card has been developed to make the expense management process fairer for your employees. With prepaid cards and controllable limits, employees have the capacity to manage business expenses seamlessly and responsibly. 

They are saved the burden of using their own cash, and the inevitable frustration of having to reclaim their money.  In turn, their time is freed up to do things which directly contribute to their role in your business. 

Importantly, employees are relieved of the onus of having to spend and then reclaim their own money. Waiting for weeks for expenses to be repaid is often cited as a key issue in employee feedback.

Employee cards provide a real-time view of employee spending and the purchase data can automatically be categorised on your expenses ledger and reconciled with your accounting software.  

The wider benefits of an expense management platform are that it provides ‘in the moment’ visibility of your spend.

This is unlike a paper-based receipt claims process, where it’s difficult, if not impossible to determine the outstanding level of spend which needs to pulse its way through the expense claims process.

So, expense management payment cards can provide an economic and tech-efficient way to manage the bad habit which is the expense management process in your business.

Unless of course you really do enjoy wrestling that octopus? 🐙