Solving Expense Reimbursement Frauds with e-Receipts

Crusader
Official Blog | Billeasy
4 min readFeb 14, 2018

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In our day to day work life, we are bound to make expenses on behalf of the company, especially if our work requires traveling. With each of these expenses being validated with a receipt for the claim process, tracking your expenses and keeping a tab on paper receipts is a laborious task not only for the employee but also for the management. It is tedious and time-consuming.

Gathering receipts, finding all the data and submitting it to the accounts department is a cumbersome task for employees with paper receipts, these shoe-boxes of bills are usually stapled and handed over to the finance department on a monthly basis.

Life would be so much easier avoiding that monthly task of collecting all your bills, filling up the expense form and submitting the physical copy to your finance department, only if employees and businesses start using e-receipts. They’re easy to generate, store and submit. Companies will be at a good place by automating their expense claim process, especially if employees have to travel for business. All transactions like flights, meals, taxis, hotel stay, etc can be stored, categorised and submitted systematically.

Struggles with Paper Receipts

Saving Paper Receipts

Each time you incur an expense on behalf of your company, you have to keep a record of the same. If this happens often, it becomes difficult to manage and store paper receipts physically. Claims are made at the end of the month and preserving receipts till then gets really brain racking.

Receipts are the only proof that an employees has to claim their expenses. A major problem with paper receipts is — no copy of the receipt means no reimbursement.

Losing Track of Business Expenses

If you regularly make expenditures on behalf of the company chances are you might miss a few receipts. They could either be misplaced or crumbled and then it might be too late to claim. Companies have stringent policies and in situations like this employees end up bearing that company expenditure.

A lot can happen to a paper receipt in a month- it could be lost, torn, damaged or even erased. It is never easy for employees to save receipts manually. It becomes challenging to balance keeping a track of expenses while getting work done.

Long Processing Time with Payrolls

At the end of the month, employees have to collect their paper receipts and submit them to the payrolls department and the managers in charge have to spend valuable time going through these receipts. Manually browsing through receipts is time-consuming and can lead to spotting claim errors, rectification, over-claiming, etc.

The time spent in submitting paper receipts and going through them thoroughly can be utilised better in other company activities.
With manual forms, the person in charge could even add up the expenses wrong on purpose and hope that nobody catches it.

Misusing Company Allowances

Reimbursements are one of the easiest ways to collect extra cash from the companies. Employees may sometimes turn sly and claim their personal expenses under business expenses by forging fake bills. Such expenses leave the company in a situation where they get nibbled away by piranha rather than being eaten by the big sharks.

Digital Receipts Making a Difference

Digital receipts are collected electronically and hence stored in one digital platform. Employees don’t have to think hard about where they left their receipt last. It’s easy to store, manage and bundle together receipts for expense claims. Solutions like Billeasy that provide e-bills alleviate the employees as-well as companies from the burden of managing paper receipts.

Receive a Penny for Your Penny Digitally!

Using digital receipts efficiently would lead to employees receiving a penny for a penny, with no chance of employees misplacing their receipts ever again. They won’t have to splurge anything from their wallets. Making the most of technology, employees and management can both compromise on any kind of errors related to expense claims.

Simultaneous Monitoring

When working through an expense management app like Billeasy, management can approve claims to e-receipts as and when they occur. Managers don’t have to wait for employees to submit the paper receipt. This takes away the pressure off from the management, especially at the month end.

If the receipts are in the digital form instead of paper, employees can save time carrying them around. They can simply use their smartphones to track their business expenses and have managers verify them.

Get Rid of Fraud Claims.

You cannot create your own imaginary restaurant and fake a digital bill for a meal you never ate. Automation of company expenses through e-bills can lead to them capturing and approving expenses as per company policy.
Billeasy can help reduce fraud as management has clear information about what their employees are spending their allowances on, along with a digital copy of the receipt to authenticate it. This will reduce the distress of companies.

Billeasy also has an option of bifurcating your personal and business expenses to make the reimbursement process simplified. The e-receipts generated with Billeasy will be highly authentic as these are received directly from the vendors system digitally, reducing the chances of any fake transactions.

By moving to digital receipts, companies today can save themselves tons of hours of the finance team in processing these expense claims and reduce chances of fraud by employees.

Billeasy is all set to revolutionise the expense reimbursement process in companies with digital receipts.

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