Approvals are a huge bottleneck to processing employee expense reimbursements. Without a foolproof corporate expense policy, it can take days or weeks before an employee is reimbursed. As a result, employees often feel reluctant to spend out of their pockets to drive projects to completion.
Fortunately, there are ways to reduce delays in processing time or remove them altogether.
Spenmo has recently launched its Custom Approval Workflows for Employee Reimbursements. This product update allows finance managers to create custom workflows to automate the expense approval process. Whether you are a company processing reimbursements for 10 or 1000 employees, creating custom workflows in Spenmo can help reduce processing times from days to minutes.
Read our list to find out the many ways you can use this feature to optimise your approval processes.
1) Get started quickly by creating a default workflow
Choosing our default workflow is a quick fix to automating approvals. By creating this workflow, reimbursement requests will only need to be approved by an admin or a team manager.
2) Assign one or more approvers according to specific conditions
Companies with complex expense policies can maintain control and visibility by assigning multiple approvers, who then receive these requests based on a workflow that responds to any of the following conditions:
- The team that initiated the expense.
- The amount of expense
- The expense category
3) Create multiple workflows according to your expense policy
Set up multiple custom workflows that suit your team's needs or duplicate existing ones to speed up the process.
4) View all approval requests on one page
Bill payments and employee reimbursements, which typically require manager approval, can both be viewed on the Approvals page for convenience.
5) View details of an expense before approving them
Clicking a transaction on the Approvals Page reveals its details, allowing managers to view the expense report and its attachments. They can also approve and decline the requests on the same page.
6) Approve multiple requests in bulk
Managers can filter transactions on the Approvals page, select multiple requests and approve them simultaneously.
7) Immediately send out reimbursements once approved
Once all approvals are met, requests are marked as “ready for payment”. Only last step approvers have the ability to pay reimbursement requests.
8) Automatically reconcile approved expense claims to your accounting software
Reimbursements are automatically synced to Xero once they are approved and paid out to the employee. If you're not using Xero, you can export transactions and bank statements to your preferred accounting software.
Streamline Your Expense Reimbursement Process
Relying on email threads, messaging apps, and the like to process expense approvals is the root cause of delays.
Spenmo's latest feature update will not only help you save time but also improve employee satisfaction with your company’s reimbursement policies. By consolidating the end-to-end employee reimbursement process in one software, you can cut through the clutter, eliminate the need for multiple platforms, and streamline the entire process.
Improve compliance and control over corporate expenses by embedding your existing approval processes into our automated workflow. Book a demo with us today and see how we can help you transform your expense reimbursement process.