No-one will have missed the fact that today is Friday. However, it's also the last Friday of the month. In many companies, this is the time chosen to battle with the period's expense management.
Those workers who've been travelling for the company gather together all their receipts and get down to producing their expense claims. This is often called "Office Friday"; in other words, paperwork day.
It's obviously necessary to manage expenses. Naturally, workers want to be refunded what they've spent while working and the company needs these expenses to be justified in detail. However, expense management should not necessarily entail hours and hours spent on paperwork.
Paper-based workflow is inefficient: it's a source of continual errors and entails significant costs. Just think of all the time workers spend on collecting together their receipts and writing up their expense claims. Now multiply that by all the workers who travel and by each month in the year. It's not small fry, is it? All this wasted time has a cost and would be better invested in actually doing some productive work for the company. Why not spend an afternoon visiting one more client instead of doing all this paperwork?
Expense management tools such as Captio focus precisely on this problem. Their aim is to make it easier to enter and check the company's expenses. The time saved in reporting and checking expenses is calculated at between 50% and 70%.
However, each organisation is a world unto itself. We're carrying out a survey to determine the time each company devotes to managing its expenses. Would you like to help us? Why not share your figures with us in the comments? How long does an average worker spend on preparing his or her expense claim in your company? How often is this done? How long does it take to check and approve an expense claim? Thank you for your help!
