Expense reimbursement is a method of paying employees back for spending their own money on business-related expenses. These circumstances usually occur when an employee travels or makes a purchase for business purposes. It’s an important part of a company’s financial management policy but at times it can be brushed aside.
Some employees and companies look at the expense reimbursement process as a hassle. This is due to many factors that affect their behavior and approach to it. Certain businesses have been known to have a complex approach when it comes to expenses that would drive employees to be less motivated to doing it.
For any type of business, tracking your expenses is crucial to determine your financial standing. Therefore it should be a priority that you optimize your expense reimbursement process to change your employee’s perspective about it.
In order to do that you have to know what your employees think of the process. Let’s discuss the psychology behind procrastination of expense reimbursement.
They find it tedious
Expense forms have the tendency to be increasingly more complex as the finance department adds new fields and requirements to cover new types of expenses as they arise. Employees find filling out forms and answering endless questions quite annoying. So its better to review the forms that need to be filled every now and then to determine how to simplify them. An even better solution would be to ditch papers altogether and automate.
There are apps that can be installed and used to automate your expense reimbursement. One particular app that is recommended is Xpense.PRO. Xpense.PRO captures receipts, categorize expenses and apply for reimbursements.
Time-consuming
Life is what happens when you are busy filing expense reports. At times, the majority of a financial department employee’s work is consumed by the expense report. Plus it takes over a week to process expense claims. Some spend an absurd amount of time just completing them. Having two versions of the same forms used for filing expense reports is a good way to shorten filing time. One for simple expenses and one for complex expenses.
Losing a receipt means no reimbursement
Equivalent to losing important company data by not having a Chrome VPN extension, if an employee loses a receipt of any business transaction then it will be void for reimbursement. It would greatly cut down incidents like those once you allow your employees to send digital copies of the receipts as an alternative and a precautionary measure.
Needing to use personal credit cards
Sometimes employees use their personal credit cards for business-related transactions and that makes it difficult when it comes to reimbursement. Since reimbursing is slow, the employee gets stuck with interest charges on their card. It gets even more inconvenient with large purchases or simultaneous purchases that could lead to maxing out their account.
It’s better to lend credit cards owned by the company for your employees to use. Set up a review process to monitor and ensure that they are using it for company-related transactions.