4 Hours Per Expense Report?
Before You Say No …

How about 15 minutes? That could be true if all you’re doing is filing your expenses.
As most folks are aware, expense reporting automation is fully matured. It’s subscription-based,
in the cloud, supporting everything from e-receipts to automatic credit card downloads, reporting
and approving – all from a smart device.

However, if you bill back expenses to clients and projects your per-expense report time investment could be much higher.  Why? Because that second half of the workflow is often stuck using processes and applications developed decades ago. Organizing expense bill back properly takes an unprecedented amount of detail. That is to say at granular levels with sophisticated cost tracking per client, project, activity and task, splitting expenses across clients, and associating receipt images with each item.

This process is often accomplished manually – even by companies with state-of-the-art front end expense and travel management software. Expense report data is exported into spreadsheets where it’s sorted and re-arranged to reflect the expenses against the client’s project. Receipts are collected, copied, and then re-assembled with each client statement. Splitting an expense between clients? Copy the receipt twice!

As you can see, there can be a major gap in how technology is applied to the overall workflow. Focusing on the spend side is a wise business decision but only focusing on the spend side is not.

That ‘4 Hour’ number is real.

Billing back expenses properly should be just as efficient as the process to report the expenses in the first place.

And it can be.