How The Finance Team Can Ensure Audit-ready Business Receipts

To establish that all deductions and returns are viable, business receipts are rather essential. They also help identify differences between internal finance records and bank statements. A lack of receipts indicates an unreliable record-keeping system.

Receipt management is key to simplifying spend management and ensuring your finance team is audit-ready.  This post will articulate the challenges of traditional receipt management and the relevance of contemporary solutions.

Traditional Receipt Management

Manual receipt management is tough as it adds to storage woes — it can be illegible, damaged, or misplaced in the course of a few weeks. This poses a problem to employees, causing a delay in processing expense reports and reimbursements and losing out on reimbursements in some cases. Moreover, submitting paper receipts on time can be challenging for employees who already have a lot of things to take care of. For the finance teams, however, this poses a bigger problem for accounting, storing and staying audit-ready.

In a nutshell, the following are some of the key challenges in traditional receipt management:

• Centralized storage so the receipts don’t get lost

• Ensuring fragile paper receipts are undamaged

• Simplified storage system making to easy to locate specific receipts

Receipt Management Today

With the rate at which businesses are growing and scaling today, it is increasingly difficult to manage business receipts and stay audit compliant. Receipts need to be efficiently stored, organized, and managed and the traditional methods of receipt management are labour-intensive and time-consuming and inefficient to say the least.

To stay audit-ready, businesses must look into managing all business receipts related to expense reports in a way that is easily accessible, searchable and actionable. This would allow business owners to not only enable improved expense tracking but also save time, effort and improve overall productivity. This system is far more efficient leaving no room for human errors or giving scope for any frauds.

Modern receipt management has been developed after looking at the pitfalls of traditional methods. This has led to novel technological developments such as receipt scanners, applications for receipt management, and expense management software. These software and applications enable end-to-end automation, simplifying the process.

Staying Audit-Ready

Create

The first thing to remember is to get employees to be proactive by labeling the expenses correctly. Creating a pertinent note against each expense and receipt can simplify classification in the subsequent steps. Business owners should explore how they can minimize effort in doing so by creating  SOPs or short manuals.

Organize

Organizing the business receipts and categorizing them based on various metrics makes it easy to look back at specific reports without having to comb through volumes of receipts. This makes tax declaration and submission time hassle-free, further reducing time and effort.

There are several categories such as travel, advertising, professional licenses, legal and professional fees, and more. Each of these can also be used for tax-deductible purposes if they fulfill certain criteria. Manually classifying every single expense claim can be time-consuming — this is where businesses must look into leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence.

Carefully Curate

It’s necessary to organize expenses uniformly and use a business-only credit card(s) or bank account(s) wherever possible. Automated expense management software can aid in this process, but even then, it is essential to use the same organizational method. This maintains consistency in business receipts collection while keeping the data uniform and staying compliant.

How does modern receipt management help?

Streamlined expense reporting

Multiple business-related expenses make it tricky to keep track of all the business receipts. With the labour-intensive nature of reporting, there is a high likelihood it will be put off by employees, leading to loss or damage of receipts. This sets off a chain reaction leading to delay in submitting reports, delay in reimbursements all of which may result in faulty insights.

Automated reporting eliminates the time-consuming nature of manual reporting.

• Receipts can be scanned and submitted on the go.

• Mobile applications allow for easy submission of expense reports from anywhere.

• Secure, digital storage prevents receipt damage or loss.

• Checks on policy violations in real-time through fraud detection technology etc

This leads to reports being generated on time allowing the finance team to focus on the business strategic tasks that demand their attention.

Unlimited, secure storage

With manual storage, you have to keep making more space, organize the reports properly, and store business receipts safely. Automation removes the hassle and worry that comes with storage and access, offering unlimited cloud storage.

With an increasing number of business travelers, physical expense reports are rather voluminous. In addition to business receipts and invoices, this is very hard to keep track of.

Automated expense management offers unlimited cloud storage capable of handling expense reports and receipts. This provides centralized access while eliminating the possibility of misplacing, damaging or losing business receipts.

End-to-end visibility of business expenses

Tracking expense reports and accessing a single report when there is a large number of them is very time-consuming and tedious.

An automated expense management system stores all expense data on a single platform. This feature ensures simplified access to pertinent data with the flexibility to search based on different metrics such as date, category of expense, department, project, etc.

The software makes it possible to review and approve expense reports in a single-window allowing faster reimbursements while staying compliant. Managers gain control and visibility over the expense management system. With technologies like OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and AI(Artificial Intelligence) being used for app-based reporting and fraud management, both employees and managers will have to spend little to no time in spend management. Managers will have actionable insights to spend smarter, plan budgets, and manage compliance.

Get started with Zaggle Save

Managing receipts can be overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be. Take the first step and digitize and automate the receipt management at your enterprise. Our free expense management platform, Zaggle Save can help you get started. Sign up for free today.

This all-in-one do-it-yourself software can empower your business to spend smarter and reduce time and effort. Zaggle Save makes expense management safe and efficient. It removes the need for time-consuming, labour-intensive paperwork eliminating cases of fraudulent spending.

With real-time expense reporting, smart scan, AI-powered fraud detection & prevention mechanism, enterprises can effectively handle various facets such as Travel & Expenses, Business Expenses, Petty Cash, Employee Reimbursement, and Benefits.