Expense report automation software: What to look for

Expense report automation solutions on the market can free up your finance staffers by eliminating inefficient manual/Excel procedures that they may be using to process employee expenses.

Automation solutions with optical character recognition technology can even eliminate the need for complex expense policies.

If you’d rather have team members working on more strategic tasks, here’s some important criteria for your automation platform search.

Expense report automation must-haves

Spend management software provider Spendesk recommends taking a close look at these when evaluating an expense report automation product:

• Easy set-up. Some expense management software is so complex that it can take up to six months to set up, plus a team member to manage it full-time. You’ll want to steer clear of anything like that and focus on tools that come ready to use.
• Easy adding and removing of users. As your company grows, your expense management tools should be scalable with staffing changes.
• Easy integration with your accounting system. Because the goal is saving time, you don’t want staffers to be stuck copying data from one platform and pasting it to another. Expense software should be able to “talk” directly to the other systems your finance team relies on.
• Permission levels for both you and your managers. Remember, your managers will need to be able to access the program to approve their team members’ spending, and
• Built-in approval flows so you don’t have to spend time following up with individual managers.