Contents
“Why am I still not reimbursed?”
“Can I book a hotel regardless of its price?”
“Why do you reimburse me less than my colleague in Marketing?”
“I lost my receipt, is it serious?”
If this sounds familiar, we invite you to keep on reading this article.
Everyone wants to reduce the time and costs associated with corporate expense processing. The real questions are, does your company structure allow it? Are your employees ready to accept the implementation of new rules? Whatever your answer is, there is no harm in taking a quick look and seeing what benefits you can bring to your company.
1- Set limits on expense reimbursement
If you don’t want your employees to be refunded on the basis of actual costs, you have to prevent them from spending more than they are entitled to. For example, you can set limits according to:
-
The type of expense (restaurant, hotel, internal invitation, customer invitation, train, plane…)
-
The category of employee (Salesmen / Management / Non-managerial employee …)
-
By location (France/foreign countries, French cities, provinces…)
2- Manage exceptions
Sometimes the employee has no choice but to exceed the authorized expense limit. Imagine, for example, during a sports event, that there are no rooms left in 2-star hotels, so Bernard was forced to book a 4-star hotel. In this situation,
- To what extent do you authorize the overrun?
- In the future, should expenses like this be validated by a manager first?
3- Set up an approval workflow
Setting up an approval workflow is complex but will eventually streamline the processing of your employees’ expense reports.
-
How many hierarchical levels should there be between the creation of the expense report and the final validation by the accounting department?
-
Do all employees have the same approval circuit? What are the exceptions?
4 – List non-reimbursable expenses per expense report
Think about good old Bernard and his splurging on the hotel minibar, alcohol at the restaurant, and lobster meal! Think about the company credit card!
Discover Notilus!
With our OCR, all fields such as VAT, currency or amount are automatically detected. With the electronic archiving, your expense receipts are stored in a secure cloud, no more paper.
5 -Establish rules
The employee needs to know if an expense he or she is going to incur will be reimbursed in the end.
This is why you should not hesitate to list all the rules that need to be respected. For example: the reimbursement of breakfast taken at the train station is only valid for departures before 06:00.
6 – Make it easy for the employee to file the expense report
Having an expense report filing tool allows employees to enter their expense reports at any time, regardless of where they are. The application must be easy to use and visually appealing.
Expense report management solutions are a boon for employees.
7 – Increase expense report follow-up by the employee
This is another advantage for the employee.
If they can track the status of their expense report and, even better, know when they will be reimbursed, then they will be more open to learning the rules you have set.
8 – Finally… Be uncompromising
The success of a new reimbursement policy cannot be achieved without a strong strategy from a “Change Management”.
Granted, change is difficult to implement in a company. It can even be frightening, but it is up to you, buyers, travel managers, and accountants, to adopt the right language and the right techniques so that change is not only perceived as a constraint by your employees (which, let’s face it, will probably be their first reaction) but also a benefit.
And this is where Notilus comes in
A mobile application on the stores and a SaaS version in the office… imagine if Bernard had Notilus with him during his business travel!
Before his trip,
Bernard can book his hotel, cab, train directly from Notilus. He will no longer have to pay in advance, nor will he have to search for hours on booking sites for the best offers.
During his trip,
Bernard will be able to make his expense report from anywhere through Notilus’ mobile application, owing to the most powerful OCR in the market boasting a 95% of recognition rate. Thanks to electronic archiving with probative value and Notilus’ guarantee for 10 years of data storage in a secure cloud, Bernard will even be allowed to throw away the paper receipt (yes, yes it has been legal since 2019!).
After his trip,
Bernard will have access to all information related to his appointments, means of transportation, and expense reports, as everything is centralized in Notilus. With your travel guidelines and reimbursement policy directly configured inside the solution, Bernard will no longer be able to order lobster with the company card…that’s a shame. But hey, at least, he will get his business expenses reimbursed in record time!
Our solution is dedicated to the moblity management. In addition to the expense reports management you can plan, book and track your business trips. It is also possible to manage your car fleet.
