Three tips to avoid Christmas expense management mayhem

The lead-up to Christmas comes with an increasing number of expenses related to seasonal events, outings, and other items. The holiday season is not only a drain on company and office budgets, but can often cause an expense management backlog. This can be made worse by paper-based claiming processes.

December 8 is one of the busiest days of the year in Australia for expense activity, according to Concur’s expense transaction data, which is comprised of over 30 million expense reports globally.

Matt Goss, ANZ managing director, Concur, said, “The Christmas period can be a painful time for lodging and claiming expenses. There are a number of things organisations can do to make the process much easier for everyone.”

Concur offers three tips to help businesses ease the expense management stress in the lead up to Christmas:

1. Review internal processes

Companies should review their existing processes. Businesses need to look at existing practices holistically and try to identify the areas where processes may be inadvertently duplicated or slowed down by administrative bottlenecks.

2. Integrate mobility with online systems

Mobile devices provide a great way for employees to quickly digitise their expense information and immediately send it to their organisation’s cloud-based or online expense management platform. Businesses should incorporate mobile devices in their expense management processes to take advantage of this.

3. Reiterate company policies clearly

Companies should clearly state and reinforce spending policies. This helps reduce surprises and bottlenecks in the claiming process. If employees don’t know what they can or can’t claim, it’s going to cause confusion for everyone.

Matt Goss said, “As well these simple tips, one of most effective ways of getting through the Christmas period without being overwhelmed by expense management tasks is by using automated systems to digitise and streamline the process.

“This way, organisations can reduce paper-based, manual expense management processes, making it a lot faster and easier to get expenses finalised before New Year’s Day."

Source: Matt Goss, Concur ANZ, 18^th November 2015