Expense Reimbursements: What's the ideal way to handle them?

When dealing with your company’s expense reimbursements, you've likely come across multiple issues:

• Filling in expense reports isn’t easy. It takes up a lot of employees' and managers' time.
• Employees often have to pay out of their pocket and wait for more than a month for their receivables.
• Using paper receipts can make it hard to keep track of expenses.
• Employees rarely read expense policies and are more likely to make mistakes.

If you want an easier and simpler way to manage corporate expense reimbursements, the best alternative is to use a platform that can automate expense management, track company spending in real time, and help you close your books faster. 

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Here are a few ways an expense management solution can help your company take care of expense reimbursements better:

Give your employees company cards

In most small to medium enterprises,, there is usually only one company card that stays with either the manager or accountant. Everyone in the company has to go through that person to initiate various spends, such as fuel, software subscriptions or marketing expenses among others. Tracking all the various expenses initiated by your employees can get chaotic. In a world where people work remotely, be it full time or part-time, this can become incredibly time-consuming for all parties involved.

With a spend management solution, you can issue personal cards to all your employees for their corporate expenses, and monitor all transactions from a single dashboard. Companies can load cash, set spending limits, and activate or deactivate cards with a single click.

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Set spending limits

You cannot manage your budgets properly if there isn’t an easy way of tracking and controlling corporate expenses and setting spend limits. As we mentioned before, this is especially true if you’re a young, fast growing company: the more you spend, the shorter your runway will be.

Spend management solutions let you enable spending limits on your employee company cards. That means you can rest assured your employees are not overspending, while you can quickly see where they are spending their budgets. For instance, If you’ve issued a card for your employee for business travel expenses, they can only use that card at Emirates, Etihad or Fly Dubai. Such restrictions from the dashboard won't let employees misuse the budget.

Avoid using paper receipts

If you are one of those firms still relying on paper and spreadsheets to manage expenses, then you already know that physical receipts are a pain. You end up with a box full of paper, and it’s either you, your accountants or your CFO that has to deal with the headache of sorting through it all at the end of the month.

With a spend management solution, your employees just need to take a photo of the receipt and upload it to an app. No paper trail.

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Speed up the process and handle it all from one place

When done correctly, expense management can positively impact your business’s financial performance and help improve your firm’s bottom line.

A spend management platform provides you with a one-stop shop for expense management. Currently, you might have one app to help manage expenses, an app to upload receipts, a credit card for big expenses, and another card for cashback and rewards. When your employees start spending on various line items, from vendors and subscriptions to fuel and hardware, managing and tracking spends can quickly get complicated. Integrations between accounting apps and cards don’t work either, which results in a lot of manual submissions.

Spend management solutions make life easier: when everything happens under one ecosystem, your employees and you use one solution for spending, tracking, and reimbursements. The entire process suddenly happens in a matter of seconds, not days.

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How to set up expense reimbursements with a spend management platform like Alaan

Alaan is an integrated spend management platform that can help manage your business expenses under one platform.

1. Sign up for free

The Alaan spend management platform is free to sign up for. That means you can try it as a spend management platform without risking or committing to anything.

When you sign up with Alaan, our team will first schedule a demo with you to take you through the platform, helping you figure out how you can save both time and money. Once you’re in and have submitted the required details, you are given access to your own Alaan dashboard. There are no hidden fees. It’s free. 

2. Request your employee cards

Once your Alaan account is up and running, you can order as many Alaan Visa cards for your employees and yourself from the dashboard. There’s an easy-to-use, backend dashboard that allows you to set spending limits, view real-time transactions and more. Oh, did we mention this is free as well?

3. Spend and get up to 2% cashback

Your employees and you will be able to spend anywhere that accepts Visa credit cards. As and when spends are made, you’ll be able to see the transaction in real time on your dashboard, with details about the merchant, category, total cost and time and date of purchase. Your employees can spend up to their assigned limit as set by you on the dashboard.

Not only will you be able to monitor your transactions regularly, but you can also add notes and receipts, approve spends, and more. At the end of the month, you’ll receive a statement with all the information needed. Your accountant won’t have to deal with 20 different expense statements from different employees: it’s all consolidated into one!

Want to know more about Alaan and the amazing features we offer to make finance leaders like your lives easier?

Schedule a call with our experts to learn how Alaan lets you automate expense management and track company spending in real time. Sign up now. It’s free. :)

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