Employees working in an organization may make some purchases on the company’s behalf at times. They get the reimbursements with their salaries or ahead of time in some cases, thanks to the active assistance of the finance team. Now, the question is: Are manual systems efficient enough to handle such employees expense process? The answer is simple – No. Finances managed manually are bound to have mistakes or inaccuracies, which may delay the reimbursement process for employees.
This is where customization comes in, which involves providing streamlined solutions to such challenges. It helps simplify expense management and minimize the risk of mistakes. Microsoft Dynamics Business Central plays a key role here. It’s a cloud-based business management solution for small to medium-sized businesses. Now, let’s delve into the best customization strategies to streamline the employee expense process for better accuracy.
Understanding the Employee Expense Process
An employee expense report is a method leveraged by several business owners to reimburse their respective employees. It allows the staff working in a particular organization to request expense reimbursement for all kinds of work-related expenses. An expense report usually includes a list of expenses incurred, the date, amount, and purpose of each specific expense.
Then comes employee expense management which can be defined as any organized method for processing all kinds of organizational expense reports and approvals, as well as other employee reimbursable expenses. Expense management often entails more than just keeping track of employee-initiated expenses. Sometimes, it also defines different kinds of policies that are used to manage spending all at once.
Let’s take a look at a typical configuration in a particular organization. On behalf of the same company, an employee from one of the departments makes a purchase related to the job. Then, the following circumstances usually occur:
- Employees submit their respective expense reports to management for reimbursement claims.
- Those reimbursement claims are either accepted or rejected by the finance team.
- Payments are often scheduled and then made.
- Auditing purposes may necessitate the retention of certain records and receipts from the employee’s side.
Each of these steps keeps anything related to finances, salaries, or reimbursements from falling between the cracks. In the event of an ill-advised or faulty purchase, corrective action can be taken immediately.
Challenges of Employee Expense Management Processes
Managing employee expenses can be complex and tricky, particularly if you want both real-time and accurate data. As businesses work harder to stay competitive and manage resources effectively, addressing these challenges becomes a mandate for every organization. Major hurdles you need to overcome in this section include:
Missing Receipts: There is no denying that anyone can lose or forget to collect receipts when working in a particular organization. However, when these receipts go missing, it often complicates the reimbursement process. In worst cases, this can also lead to incomplete or incorrect employee expense reports. This delays reimbursements and creates headaches during audits.
Late Submissions: It’s common for a few employees to submit their expenses late, which may mess up accounting schedules and cash flow. Timely submissions are the key to keeping everything running smoothly. Failing to do so means delays can be a real hassle for the employees and accountants or bookkeepers.
Approval Delays: If the approval process isn’t optimized or streamlined properly, it can result in major bottlenecks for the organization in question. Sometimes, busy managers or multiple layers of approval can also significantly slow the process down. This is especially frustrating for employees who may be waiting for their reimbursements and impacts the organization’s overall efficiency.
Misclassified Expenses: As mentioned earlier, manual data entry is always prone to mistakes, regardless of whether someone entered the wrong amount or misclassified an expense after missing a receipt altogether. These errors may result in inaccurate employee expense reports that need more time and effort to fix.
Duplicate Claims: Sometimes, claims from a particular employee can be accidentally submitted twice. This can lead to overpayment and also complicate the entire tracking process for both accountants and bookkeepers. It means they also have to sort through duplicate entries.
How Does Customization Help Streamline Employee Expense Processes?
Customization within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central can transform employee expense management from a manual headache into an automated, accurate, and time-saving process. You can easily customize the cloud-based platform to fit your organization’s unique workflows and policies. It allows you to resolve common issues like lost receipts, late submissions, and misclassified expenses with minimal effort.
Business Central Expense Management is a key feature in Dynamics 365 Business Central to oversee all the expenses of a particular business, irrespective of its size, in one single place. The feature streamlines the company’s entire expense management process in the following ways:
Control Employee Expenses Easily
Manually managing employee expenses is tedious and time-consuming at best. Finance teams across businesses often struggle to process and reimburse expenses quickly because of excessive errors and lost or damaged receipts. This also leaves you vulnerable to all kinds of fraudulent reporting which may cost your business more money. Managing employee expenses is the key to controlling your company’s operational costs. Microsoft Dynamics Business Central helps digitize your employee expense management process, among other things. Other benefits include:
- Employees across the organization follow expense policy guidelines
- They spend within their budget limit
- Expense processing and reimbursement times are quick and efficient
Digitize and Automate Your Processes
You can get a real-time overview of employee expenses or spending by automating your expense management process with Microsoft Dynamics Business Central. Expense reporting has never been easier than with this customization process where employees can easily upload their receipts through the provided portal on the platform. This also allows immediate visibility and quicker processing.
Digitizing your employee expense management process allows your finance team to work more flexibly. This, in turn, helps free up time for more important tasks while you and your employees stay on top of your company expenses.
Keep Track of Cash Flow
Business Central also allows you to keep track of the company cash flow in your finance department. This becomes possible by tracking employee spending in real time. With Microsoft Dynamics, you can easily monitor and control the entire organization’s expenses while keeping an eye on individual employees.
Adding expense management to your strategy can also help your CFO make timely, data-backed decisions, especially when planning the entire company’s budget.
Collect Receipts Digitally
Lost or damaged receipts may often hinder employees from receiving their reimbursements. In many cases, this may further add to lengthy processing and reimbursement times. Microsoft Dynamics Business Central offers excellent customization opportunities to digitize receipt collection in your company.
All that your employees need to do is snap a picture of their paper receipt and upload it using the related portal to submit their expenses.
Avoid Fraudulent Expense Claims
As a financial controller, your responsibility is to keep the company’s money safe from fraudulent expense reporting. You may also come across employees who lie on their expense reports. While some do so with malicious intent, a few others try to remember details from the information they no longer have.
Business Central allows the automation of expense reporting using techniques like intelligent OCR. It means employees no longer have to spend time entering information manually. This also means they are less likely to falsify data in such cases. If a particular employee expense receipt is missing, the system sends a reminder automatically for the employee to submit the missing documentation.
Embrace the Future of Automated Employee Expense Processes
Automating and customizing your employee expense management process is only one step in the journey towards automated accounting and bookkeeping. Although bookkeeping is the foundation of effective accounting, a lot of errors and bottlenecks can occur in this process.
Hence, getting it right is vital for the welfare of the employees of any organization. You can simplify all of your downstream accounting requirements by streamlining your expense management process. This will improve the efficiency of your entire operations within a short period.
The best way to do so is seek assistance from Microsoft Dynamics Business Central for the most efficient customizable strategies to streamline the expense processes. It delivers receipt culture, automated categorization, and efficient integrations with major accounting systems to streamline the process.
It also supports AI-driven anomaly detection that flags unusual expense patterns and integrates with Power BI for dashboard-level insights into employee expense trends, approval times, and recurring bottlenecks. These integrations give CFOs, and finance leads powerful decision-making tools backed by real-time data instead of outdated spreadsheets.
Moreover, custom workflows built using Power Automate can trigger alerts for policy violations, auto-approve low-risk reimbursements, or escalate out-of-policy claims directly to department heads, no more manual intervention at every step.
Expense categories can be tightly linked to GL accounts, project codes, or cost centers, which simplifies reconciliation and ensures accurate allocations across departments or client billables. It’s all built into the ERP fabric without external plug-ins.
Enabling businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers to customize and automate employee expense management is exactly why you need to collaborate with Streams Solutions. This makes it simpler for you and your employees to submit all employee expenses on the go.
