3 ways to work with A/P team to boost T&E compliance

Correcting mistakes and preventing misunderstandings from employees concerning your T&E policies is not only time-consuming for your A/P team, but it can hurt the company’s bottom line if expenses are consistently reimbursed incorrectly.

With that in mind, it’s important to work closely with A/P to make sure employees understand your reimbursement policies and aren’t regularly making costly mistakes when they’re turning in expense reports.

Strategies for you & your A/P team

To help, here are three tried-and-true tactics that can improve T&E compliance, reduce confusion and save money.

1. Use mistakes as training tools. The next time your team receives an expense report with a common error on it, have them black out the personal info and hang it outside A/P – along with an explanation of what’s wrong and how to fix it. Road-warriors can learn the lesson from word of mouth. But if they see a real-world mistake and how they can avoid it on their own expense reports, it’ll come up far less for your A/P team.

2.  Stagger big policy changes. As the pandemic continues, you and your A/P team may need to develop new guidelines about the types of expenses that your company will reimburse once workers resume traveling regularly. At EFW Inc., located in Fort Worth, TX, A/P needed to make some big changes to its T&E policy. So to soften the blow, they developed a strategy that staggered the T&E policy changes over several months. Travelers received a heads-up about the first change, with a month lead time to understand and begin following it. After that, the A/P team introduced the next change, and so on. Employees easily got used to the incremental changes, and they were less likely to make errors on their expense reports.

3. Analyze spending patterns. Many companies don’t closely review how they spend T&E dollars when reimbursing employees. To root out mistakes that may fall through the cracks and find more opportunities for savings, have your A/P team regularly review spending by the type of expense to determine whether, say, focusing on airfare or hotel stays would help your company save the most. Determining total T&E spending by department’s also valuable. Doing this will show you who the most frequent policy offenders are. And that will give you insight into what areas to focus on to correct these issues.